a working holiday

My absent colleague did not come in again today.  She didn't reply to the owner's messages either, and we are left with the feeling that we won't see her again.  Certainly the owner was lining up tea shop girls for the rest of the week.  Last Tuesday, when she didn't turn up, that left only the manager on duty.  He was fretting that if he'd known this person was not going to come in, he could have asked someone else, but in truth he is running out of people to ask.  One of the part-timers, who is eligible for her pension and normally does one or two days a week, stepping down in the winter, has been working four day weeks to help out, and the only way he could arrange cover for my holiday was to persuade the other to do three consecutive days next month.  She is a fit and active woman, but as she says, at the age of sixty eight she's not sure she still wants to be lugging trees around.

The August bank holiday Monday is generally quiet in the plant trade, and so we coped quite nicely with the two of us, and the teashop girl, plus the owner coming out to help in the afternoon.  The teashop girl is a godsend.  In between customers in the teashop she is revising quadratic equations. It was quiet enough that I managed to finish sweeping and tidying my second shrub bed, Fuschsia to Enkianthus, early on and in the late afternoon.  I was disgusted to see that the viburnums, which I did yesterday, are already dropping more leaves on to the clean mypex fabric.

The credit card machine was as slow as ever.  Roll on fast rural broadband, that's what I say, but meanwhile we are still on ultra slow dial-up.  Some kind hearted customers attributed its slowness to the bank holiday, but it is always that slow.  If it were the middle of the football world cup, and ninety per cent of the population were watching it because England was unaccountably in the final, the credit card machine would still be slow.  I had my first contactless card transactions this weekend, the same chap who came in on Saturday and Sunday, and each time waved his wallet over the card reader without touching it.  I didn't even know that we had contactless terminals, and he had to tell me that I was supposed to keep the slip.  The customer doesn't get one.  Which is fair enough for small transactions.  Hands up who ever reads again most of the credit card slips that they stuff in their handbags, wallets and pockets.  Or expects to get a receipt from the Oyster card reader when they travel.

And that was about it, really.  Now I am going to go and have a tiny piece of bank holiday myself, and sit out on the veranda.