I arrived at work to find a peeved note from the owner in the ice cream tub where we keep keys, and put notes, saying that both tills had been wrong yesterday, and that there was no excuse, when we were not busy. The note didn't really make it clear what was wrong with the tills. One error involved a regular customer, that I hadn't served, and it sounded as though he might have asked to be invoiced, after his plants had been rung through the till, and as though my co-worker might have failed to clear them off the till again (using the Extra Discount button). The owner claimed not to have understood the messages I left in both tills, warning her that to make up change for a twenty pound note on one of them I'd had to take a ten pound note from the other, but I thought that was about as clear as you could possibly make it. One till was known to be ten pounds up and the other ten pounds down. If there was an additional discrepancy of £6.95 then that was an entirely separate issue. I don't think I made any mistakes on the till yesterday, but I can't be certain.
It is a fallacy to believe that, because the takings are modest, your staff are necessarily having a stress-free day in which errors need not occur. With only two sales staff on duty, plus the tea shop girl who can operate the till at a pinch and tell customers where the loo is, but not where plants are, and who does not answer the phone, it doesn't take much to have the pair of them jumping through hoops and quite up to making till errors. A couple of people waiting to pay while your colleague is occupied helping someone else find the magnolias, and a phone ringing loudly in your pocket with nobody free to answer it, and the staff are busy, at least for that ten minute period.
As I'd come to the end of the manager's list of my designated jobs, and finished someone else's for good measure, that left me with the generic instruction to sweep through the shrub beds. Clearing up fallen leaves at this time of year feels futile to the point of being Sisyphan, when there are still so many more to fall, and I couldn't see the point of lifting shrubs off the shrub beds, cleaning the beds, and lifting them back on again, if those same shrubs were going to be moved next week anyway to be put under cover in one of the tunnels. Why lift anything three times in seven days when you only need lift it once? But I did sweep up leaves and scrape green lichen and moss off the beds we'd recently cleared, to make them look tidy, and then cleaned through the Salix, since they were dreadfully messy and I knew that most of them would be staying outside for the winter.
It was the first of the music society's concerts at four. I was keen to make it, since I have a season ticket so have in a sense already paid to go, and because it was a string quartet. I love string quartets. My fantasy music society programme would alternate between string quartets, and some combination of cello and piano. No wind trios, no classical guitar, no up-and-coming sopranos, definitely no brass ensembles. It was a nuisance that this concert, and the next one, fell on my working Sundays, so that I was going to have to leave work early. Significantly early, in fact. It won't be so bad once the clocks change. I asked the owner a couple of weeks back if that would be OK, choosing my moment when I was in her good books after doing the wildlife talks, and she said yes. I left a note reminding her in the ice cream tub last night, but then came the till errors, and I was no longer in favour, so there was no reply, and by mid afternoon the family had gone out.
I was worried about leaving my colleague, and the tea shop girl, to cope for the final hour and a bit if we were busy, and I was concerned about leaving my colleague to lock up alone, given the recent burglaries in the village. However, by half past three most of the remaining customers were pensioners drinking tea, and it didn't look as though we were about to be inundated by a late rush, and my colleague said that she would not be locking up alone because she would have the tea shop girl. So I went. They were starting with Haydn, and I really didn't want to miss that. I love Papa Haydn.
It was a very, very good concert, and the church was gratifyingly full. The only slight musical glitch was that the second violin was ill in hospital, which was obviously worse for her than for us, and while the emergency substitute came from another quartet of equal standing (or roughly equal. I must ask my more musically sophisticated committee members whether she was appearing above or below her usual level), they had to drop the programmed second half Beethoven in favour of Dvorak. The Dvorak was beautiful, and probably pleased a friend who is not such a Papa Haydn enthusiast and prefers something more romantic, but Haydn and then Mozart don't really set you up in the right mood to appreciate a second half of Slavic music laced with American folk motifs.
The slight sartorial hitch was that I forgot to chuck a clean sweater and pair of shoes in the car, and had to spend the interval trying to look as though it was perfectly normal to attend a recital covered in compost and green slime and wearing wellington boots.
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