The owner and I walked around the garden first thing, with the latest draft of the garden guide, checking that everything mentioned occurred at the point where the text said it would (it did) and adding in extra trees worthy of mention. There was lots to see, with big fat bunches of snowdrops almost fully open, and camellias and witch hazels in bloom. As Monday mornings go, being paid to walk around an interesting garden is well up there as a good way to start the week. The dog came along, and more or less stayed with the owner for the entire tour. Apparently on Saturday she was taken on a shoot and disgraced herself, charging around uncontrollably. Today, truffling about in evergreens against the wall of the plant centre, she flushed out a large muntjac, which ran away in a lumbering and slightly non-urgent fashion. After a long pause the dog followed, without conviction. She is a terrier, not a hound, and doesn't seem to consider that chasing large beasts of the field is part of her remit. It's just as well, really, as she gets lost often enough running after rabbits.
Things went downhill after the positive start, and I was required to scribe for the shop stocktake. Stocktaking the shop is a task of such awful, tedious grimness that I think it is worse than doing my tax return, if that is possible. The stuff in the shop comes from umpteen different suppliers, and we don't have bar-codes. Records of stock brought forward and ordered during the year are entered on an excel spreadsheet so large that the printed version is stapled together in four separate sections, because it is too fat for our staplers to cope as a single document. The person doing the counting announces what the stock item is, and the scribe has to hunt for it in the vast spreadsheet. Sometimes whole minutes elapse between the counter saying how many items, and the wretched scribe finding the right page, by which time both have forgotten the answer and the counter has to count them again.
Insecticides. Fertilisers. Fungicides. Garden lanterns. Lamp oil. String. Gloves. Mugs. Watering cans. Raffia. Hose connectors. Toiletries. Vases. Trugs. Metal obelisks. Garden hand tools. Jam pot covers. Vegetable peeling bins. Bird boxes. Bird feeders. Plant supports. Bird food. Plant supports. Books. Greetings cards. Tea towels. Soil testing kits. Plant labels. Wooden fruit. Notepads. Bridge sets. Candles. Tea cosies. Shopping bags. Swiss army knives. Seeds. Door stops. Boot jacks. Garden kneelers. Beneficial miccorrhizae. Coat hooks. Plastic tubs. Toasting forks. Nutcrackers. Scrubbing brushes. Tissue box holders. Place mats. Seed storage tins. Kitchen roll holders. Gift wrap. Paper napkins.
We sell all of these and more, mostly in multiple sizes and colours and varieties. You wouldn't believe how many different sorts of gardening glove we stock, or how many varieties of string. Sometimes the boss has loaded the stock code on to the spreadsheet, but sometimes there is just a description. Sometimes the boss's description doesn't pick up on the key word that appears on the packaging, so a 'power saw' is recorded as a 'folding saw' (probably a more accurate description, looking at it). The scribe then spends a long time trying to match what the counter has told them to the spreadsheet, without success. Sometimes similar items appear in more than one place on the spreadsheet, so gloves give way to wellington boots, but then over the page there are suddenly some more gloves, as the spreadsheet fails to run in stock code order.
It would be too simple if all of the watering cans were together, or all of the string in one place. To make the shop appear more tempting there are themed tables and ornamental displays. One of my colleagues put together a display of green things. It was quite cute, in a sort of Gardens Illustrated shopping section way, and mixed up string, raffia, candles, vases, watering cans, candles, kitchen waste caddies, bottles for making infusions of herbal oil, gloves and a textile door stop, all coloured different shades of green. In all it ran across at least a dozen different categories of the stock sheet. My colleague would tell me that the next thing was a glove code TML406S. I would spend five minutes trying to find my way back to gloves. She would say 'There's one of those', and on we went, hunting this time for the green metal vertical sided vase.
The new member of staff starts tomorrow. Poor sod, he is going to have a baptism of fire. After the stocktake things can only get better for him.
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