Monday 9 April 2012

the long cold Monday

We were later than we meant to be getting to my in-laws yesterday.  We didn't get up as early as we should have done, and when I came downstairs I found that one of the cats had been copiously sick in the hall, so we ended up leaving home a quarter an hour later than we said we would, and then it turned out that driving to Northampton honestly takes more like two and a half hours than the two hours we'd optimistically assumed.  It's the last bit that takes forever, when the Sat Nav says you are 20 miles from your destination, and you drive and drive and it is still 20 miles.  We took a wrong turning in Northampton itself, and found ourselves heading south to join the motorway, and our destination, which had been down to only 8 miles away, suddenly leapt back to 13.  Anyway, we got there, and had a very nice day.

This morning I came downstairs to find that the door of the dishwasher had stuck shut, and I couldn't open it to unload it, so I had to leave the Systems Administrator a note that said Can't open dishwasher, and set off to work.  It was very cold at work.  And damp.  Raw, I should call it, or perhaps dank, or maybe dank and raw. Some think tank has calculated that each bank holiday costs the economy two and a half billion quid (or something) in lost output and suggested that they should be more evenly spread through the year (actually, their other suggestion was that we should scrap them altogether and each work 500 hours a year more, like the South Koreans).  Bank holidays are good for the plant retail trade, so they don't cost us, but they would be more use to us if the weather could be nicer.  There is no logical reason why the April bank holiday Monday has to be tied to the moving religious festival that is Easter, given that by Monday the religious bit is all over, so maybe it should be shifted to July, say, when the weather might be warmer.  Although there have been years recently when April has been one long heatwave and by July summer has been a total washout.

The shops doors are getting more and more erratic.  The boss is completely exasperated with the door company, who charge a fortune to service the doors without actually fixing them.  I suggested that he should look and see if he could identify the parts numbers and buy the bits on the internet, and get our friendly local electrician to fit them.  The SA, who is not any sort of qualified engineer, has so far mended a shower (replacement cartridge, basically a valve and washer), a loo (ballcock assembly), the lawn tractor (replacement starter motor mesh gear) and Kitchenaid mixer (new gasket and lubricant) by dint of finding instructions and buying parts on the internet, and his brother services his own oil-fired Aga.  You can get detailed diagrams and specifications of practically anything nowadays on the net, and buy parts, so the days of niche service companies charging mark-ups of five million percent to source and fit obscure replacement parts from Europe or the States ought to be limited.

I was the unexpected recipient of an Easter egg, which was nice, since it was my only one.  A supplier sends us nests of eggs packed in straw in 2 litre flowerpots, very jolly, as an Easter present for the staff, and the manager had kept eggs for those of us who weren't there when the delivery with the eggs arrived, after previous years when they were scoffed instantly by those who happened to be at work at the time.  Unfortunately the manager discovered the egg in the course of rummaging through his bag looking for some money he thought he'd left there, and as he didn't find the cash he became more and more anxious while I had more and more of a sinking feeling of here we go again.  Several years ago we went through a bad patch when the tills kept being down in cash terms, and never discovered the culprit, but it created an appalling atmosphere, so the thought that there might be a pilferer in our midst was terribly depressing.  The manager rang his wife in case he'd left the cash at home, and she couldn't find it either, so the gloom lasted until mid afternoon when she told him she'd found it in his other bag.  Panic over.  I leave my cash, credit cards and phone out of sight in my locked car, and keep the car key hung round my neck so I can't drop it somewhere in the plant centre.  It's not that I distrust my colleagues, but since the key to the staff room is kept on a hook on the door frame, it amounts to leaving it unlocked, and no sane person leaves their valuables all day in an unattended, unlocked room in a public place.

The last customers had gone by five, and I spent the last hour putting plants out for sale, working conscientiously to get quite a lot done, but I was mightily relieved when it got to six o'clock and I could go home.  When I got back I found a piece of dishwasher on the doorstep, and the SA explained that it really wasn't worth trying to mend this one, regardless of internet diagrams and parts.  Something to do with the automatic door locking has failed, and the SA had to jemmy it open in the end to rescue the plates and cutlery from inside.  It was a very old dishwasher.

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