staff wanted

Replies are coming in to the adverts for a plant centre assistant.  People have been ringing up about it, and dropping CVs off.  As I grappled with the question of whether there was an application form (almost certainly not.  That would have required one of us to invent a form.) I did begin to think that it might have been helpful to give the existing staff, who have to answer the telephone, a copy of the advert that would-be plant centre assistants were ringing up about.  The boss said that he'd had one application for a pant centre assistant, and an enquiry about the vacant plant centre assistant.  Oh dear.

Basic literacy shouldn't be a graduate level skill.  Apart from bona fide dyslexia sufferers, people ought to be able to spell.  Maybe not antidisestablishmentarianism, and they are allowed to look in the dictionary to check how many times c and n occur in occasionally, but they ought to be able to spell plant.  Particularly when they want to work in a plant centre.  Assuming it was a slip-up, and they know really, would you believe that anybody who couldn't be bothered to check their CV for basic spelling mistakes would ever bother to do the watering properly?

High level plant retailing actually requires good written language skills.  This is unfortunate for people who love plants and the outdoors, but can't read very well, but they should probably be looking at other branches of horticulture.  Word blindness is a real handicap in my trade.  If you can't see the difference between Echinacea 'Sunrise' and Echinacea 'Sunset', or can't grasp that 'Pink Bedder' comes before 'Purple Bedder' in the alphabet, you are going to have a problem.  And after customers have driven long distances to collect plants that turn out to be the wrong thing, or the manager orders a load of plants and then discovers we had lots already, but they were in the wrong place, the business will have a problem as well.  It's tough, but that's how it is.  We aren't talking the ability to write expressive English, or discuss the unreliable narrator in literature.  We're talking plain, boring, bread and butter ability to recognise words.

After typing the above three paragraphs I was so concerned about my own spelling that I managed to find and use the spell-checker on Blogspot, for the first time ever.  It threw up two typos, and doesn't like bona fide, antidisestablishmentarianism, unreliable or Echinacea.  Botanical Latin is always a problem using a spell-checker, but I have been teaching Word on my laptop vocabulary, so it is better than it was.  One of my favourites, many years ago when I was writing a reference for a former assistant in the City, was Microsoft's rejection of the name Cazenove, and the suggested substitution, try Casanova.