We have a new(ish) coffee machine in the shop at work. The old coffee machine had got to the point where sometimes, to make it work, you had to stand in front of it holding the door shut, which rather missed the point of it being self-service for customers. The machine produces quite drinkable coffee, as did the old one. Customers can choose their flavour, out of smooth roast, strong roast, Italian roast, decaff and goodness knows what. No cappuccino, because no hot frothy milk. The machine just adds hot water to the contents of a sachet that goes into the front of the machine. This ought to be very straighforward, except that the machine was obviously created by one of those industrial designers responsible for putting about 98 different functions on domestic stereo systems, of which the average music listener knows how to use about three.
On the front of the machine is a screen, around which are buttons. Next to the buttons it says Coffees, Teas, Wellbeing, Indulgence, Chocolates, and one button is blank. If you press any button it takes you to a second screen that says Large, Regular, Small. If you press any button it opens the front of the machine. Then you put in a sachet of the flavour of your choice, close the door, and the machine dispenses hot water and makes the drink. Sugar, UHT milk cartons and stirrers in drawers among the sachets. The trouble is that customers can't work out which button to press, and stand staring at the machine and conferring among themselves for ages until a member of staff goes to help them. Of course it doesn't matter which button they choose, since the taste is entirely determined by which sachet they insert, and there is only one size. Why not simply have a single button that says Press to Open? They can't see the drawers with the milk and stirrers in either, since these are cunningly hidden in the middle of the rows of sachets.
Somebody brought in some bits of dodgy tree for us to look at. It's a pity he chose a week when the manager was off, since the manager is good at diseases and disorders. The first specimen was from an Amelanchier, planted in 2008, which had performed well for the first year but flowered poorly and dropped its leaves very early (June-July) thereafter. The owner said it was planted on light gravely soil, and given that Amelanchier like it moist and we have had some very dry springs, I thought lack of water was probably partly to blame. It also had leaf spotting, and I was at a loss whether that was due to some disease. Now I'm at home I've just looked up diseases of Amelanchier in my two P&D books, the Collins Guide and the RHS Complete Guide to Preventing, Identifying & Treating Plant Problems, and they both only mention one disease in conjunction with Amelanchier, which is fireblight. This is a serious bacterial infection which attacks many members of the rose family, but the symptoms don't include leaf spotting. The second specimen was a spectacularly puckered leaf from a walnut. The owner said that the tree was growing very well, but that about half the leaves were affected. The leaf had raised, wrinkled sections that looked almost gall-like, and I was sure that an insect was involved, but didn't know whether it had merely been feeding on the tree, or actually laid eggs. Looking in my RHS book now I see that there is such a thing as a walnut blister mite, that sucks sap from the underside of leaves and causes distorted growth but without affecting the vigour of the tree, so maybe that's the problem. I kept the samples for the manager to have a look at next week, and the customer agreed he could email photos if required if by then the specimens were too dessicated to be any use, so we'll see. I've got a ticket for a lecture by Pippa Greenwood this autumn all about tree diseases, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Another customer wanted to know how she could propagate the Verbena rigida she was buying, and again I didn't know, though I wondered if you could take basal cuttings in spring. On the basis that when asked a question I can't answer about practical gardening I should try and remember to look it up afterwards, I've just looked in Clarke and Toogood's Complete Book of Plant Propagation, and they say semi-ripe cuttings in late summer. The plants we are selling have so many flowers on them they would scarcely yield any propagating material, and I bet they were created somehow this year and not kept over from last year, so I feel there must be another way. The customer asked if she could split it, but it didn't look splittable to me, and the book doesn't mention that. I need more books on the species by species specifics of propagation, especially cuttings. Unfortunately it is a technical subject of minority interest, and books are correspondingly expensive.
A colleague who normally works behind the scenes on The Other Side (aka the herbaceous tunnel) came over to cover for us at lunchtime, so that I would not be left running the till and the telephones single handed while my colleague disappeared for lunch (in fact he had to go out to feed a friend's cat). We have a cat at home that only really likes one person, which is me. This is shortsighted of her, as the Systems Administrator funds the lion's share of the cat food, and if she had to depend on my more modest resources she would be living on Lidl own-brand and told to catch her own mice two days a week. My colleague from The Other Side has a similar attitude, only really liking one person, who is the manager. The rest of us she tolerates or despises according to how much she thinks we annoy the manager, whom she protects as a ewe her lamb. She appeared in the shop and asked what the task was in here, with an air that faintly suggested that without the manager to chivvy us, we might have been spending the time gazing vacantly into space between serving customers, and reading Hilliers at the till. (Actually I had spent a bit of time pressing buttons on the coffee machine, to check they did all open the door). I explained that we were cleaning up a trolley of geraniums, which she attacked with gusto. When I returned from my lunch she announced that she had finished them, and taken them outside but couldn't work out my system for putting them out. This was the usual system of putting them in alphabetical order, so I did that, while she departed virtuously back to her tunnel.
The boss did not have time to print out any plant labels, either for the delivery of shrubs which arrived this morning, or for the plants that my colleague has been getting ready to go out for sale over in the herbaceous tunnel. She said that she had finished all the other jobs on her list, and that if the boss didn't print the labels, she would spend tomorrow sitting under a tree with a fag and a pint. I had better tell him in the morning.
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