I went into work today, to a breakfast party to celebrate the gardener's sixtieth birthday. All firms gradually develop their own traditions, and one of ours is the breakfast as a celebratory event, for big birthdays or retirements, though to get a leaving breakfast you have to have worked there for a long time. It's quite a sensible time of the day to hold a works do. Doing physical jobs, as we do, people are not shy about eating breakfast, while by the time we've finished work we are generally grubby, tired, and keen to get on home, and breakfast commands a captive audience, at least among those who are working that day. And while in the City you would think nothing of seeing people in the pub for after-work drinks by a quarter past five, in rural Suffolk that is really too early, and half of us are driving anyway.
It was a very fine breakfast, with cereal and fruit juice and sausage and bacon and scrambled egg and grilled tomato and baked beans and toast and croissants. Someone had made a cake, though the gardener was allowed to save that until later, and we sang happy birthday. There was a card signed by all of us, and a present from the staff and one from the owners. The dog hung around hoping for a stray sausage, and was allowed to eat the left-over scrambled egg.
The gardener does a great deal for the business. He mows, and strims, and clips the yew hedges. He chops up fallen trees, and lops broken pieces off unsafe ones, unless they are so big we need the arborist. He drives on deliveries, finding his way to addresses across the breadth of East Anglia, and coping when the van breaks down. He can mend any kind of machinery. When a hose starts leaking, or the timber work of one of the shrub beds collapses, he is your man. He installs the heater in the tunnel each winter, and stores it away each spring. He will turn his hand to potting, when there's lots to do. He digs the boss's vegetable garden, and chops his logs, and mucks out the chickens, and hauls out the little tractor when the boss has got it stuck somewhere on the estate. He drives the family on Stansted runs, and garage runs, and gets the horse box to start when it won't. He does all this quietly, with a smile. He has about the dryest sense of humour of anybody I have ever met. He is never flustered, never cross, and even in moments of panic and chaos when everybody else is shouting, I have never heard him shout, or snap. He does all this despite having been an insulin-dependent diabetic since his teenage years, which by now has left him with some of the health problems you are likely to get no matter how careful you are with your diet and your injections and everything else. I have never heard him complain. Happy Birthday, Stewart, I salute you. You are the nicest and sanest person in the entire place.
During the course of breakfast we discovered why various recent mail order requests placed by customers on the website seemed to have disappeared without trace. Our web hosting company spent some time anxiously checking for bugs in their part of the system, before the owner discovered that among the filters the boss had set up to manage incoming mail, along with those to junk the ads for viagra and on-line casinos, there was one intended to block marketing from web consultancy firms offering to push us up the Google seach rankings or whatever, that automatically deleted all incoming messages with the word 'web' in them. Which included requests for plants from our own website. Oh dear.
After the breakfast we had mail order training. The owner was upset on Monday that some packages had not been done up very well. I could see her point, on the other hand, I could also see the point of view of the person who wrapped them. Anyone who sends mail order parcels has learned it by themselves through trial and error. There has been no training or instruction on what level of packaging the parcel company requires for the parcel to be safe in transit, and whether it is OK for the top of a tree to be poking out of the top of the box wrapped in bubble wrap, or if the whole plant needs to be encased inside a box. There are no purpose-designed boxes, like the ones my smart Ashwood hellebores came in. Instead, you have to improvise with whatever recycled packaging you can find from incoming deliveries, some of which isn't really thick enough, plus any odd boxes the owner has managed to pick up or that staff have brought in. There has been no training on how to book orders with the mail order company, or how accurate the weight and dimensions data we enter on the booking form have to be (we don't have any scales). There has been no systematic training in how the networked computer system operates, or how to print from the computer in the shop, which until recently was on a wireless internet connection that didn't work half the time.
The results were about what you'd expect. Two people knew how it all worked, but one left, and the other only comes in three or four days a week. The manager didn't know how to book deliveries, though he'd given packing a go, with great trepidation. One of my co-workers had tried doing it, but their packing was deemed not up to scratch, and I refused to touch it until I'd been told more about the standards of packing required, plus how to print labels. I don't have such a nice or long-suffering temperament as the gardener, and wouldn't trust myself to submit meekly to being bawled out for getting something wrong that I hadn't been shown how to do in the first place.
The organised training session was very good. We should do more of them.
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