The holidays were finally over today, and it was back to work, where things are gently apace. The person who was offered the plant centre job turns out to have accepted it. In fact, he accepted it promptly upon being offered it, but his acceptance letter got caught up in the Christmas post and didn't reach us until December 28th. I never actually saw or spoke to my employers when I worked on New Year's Eve, so didn't know what was going on. I'm glad he's taken the job. When I met him (briefly) I thought he seemed nice and genuinely keen, and I'd hate to think that my judgement had deteriorated that badly. Besides, we need somebody, so it would be a waste to be back to square one.
They have installed a wireless link for a computer in the shop. There's no actual computer as yet, but getting the connection for it is a start. It will be very useful to be able to check and send e-mails without somebody having to leave the plant centre and schlep up to the office, and the manager will be able to use if for plant orders while remaining front of house. It could be a useful sales tool, for example, when customers ask questions like 'can you show me a picture of the flower?' but I foresee that we will have to be disciplined about not spending ages googling details of plants for them. I sometimes look up unfamiliar names for more info when browsing through seed lists, and it is possible to take an extremely long time trying to get the low down on one plant. Plus, some sites are of dubious accuracy, and quite a few that come up are American and don't relate in a straightforward way to how that plant might perform in south east England.
The new plant list, that has been stalled for nearly two years, has been resurrected as a live project. We don't run to a catalogue with photographs and descriptions (yet). I'm not sure we ever will, as it would be the size of a hefty garden dictionary, given the range of plants we carry. In early 2010 the boss sent me spreadsheets of the plants he buys in, and I spent a fair time deleting duplicate entries for plants bought from more than one supplier, or in more than one size, and pulled the whole thing together into a Word document, for the boss to check through and delete anything he thought we weren't going to sell in future for whatever reason. Principle reasons being that we can't get it any more, or it sold very badly, or it kept dying before we could sell it. The Word document was over 160 pages long, and the boss always seemed to have something else more urgent to do than look at it. Probably the thought of looking at it made him feel the need to lie down in a dark room. In the meantime, we went on using the 2006-7 list. About a year ago we ran out of copies to give to customers (it is on the website, but not all of our customers like using computers). It was embarrassing, although I'm not sure which was more embarrassing, giving people a list that was five years out of date, or not having a list at all. Last autumn the manager announced that he was now authorised to update the plant list, following which nothing happened. However, the Word document has finally made it off the office computer and into the light of day, and the manager has started crossing entries off in pencil. Of course by now there will be other plants to add, as the list has grown since early 2010. Still, it's progress.
The owner suddenly announced that we really were going to get on with the garden guide ready for the coming season. The gardener drew a rather good map of the garden about two years ago, and last spring I produced some text, and the whole project quietly went into hibernation, but now we are on to a revised map to allow for changes that have been made to the garden since the original one was drawn, and revised text (including where I had put some trees in the wrong place, but I did write it at home without the benefit of a planting plan or the ability to nip outside and check). The idea is to have a fairly plain guide in year one, that's not too expensive to produce, and go on to something glossier when we've tested it on the public, and had the chance to iron out any glitches.
A customer rang up wanting to reserve some plants, who turned out to be called Pennyfeather, which she carefully spelt for me saying it was ususual, and it turned out that she was not aware of the Eveleyn Waugh character Paul Pennyfeather. How can you reach adulthood with the name Pennyfeather and not have come across your namesake in Decline and Fall? She seemed pleased to hear that a Pennyfeather had been immortalised in literature, but maybe she was being polite and was privately bewildered. Another customer rang wanting to pay for a plant that had been the subject of a protracted exchange of e-mails with one of my colleagues. No plant had actually been reserved, but fortunately we still had some. The e-mails appeared to have been deleted. The manager asked me why my colleague should have done that, and I explained that if I were a cynical person I would say it was to ensure that things worked smoothly when they were there, and not so much when they weren't, thereby reinforcing their image of being indispensable. However, as I am not a cynical person of course I did not think any such thing.
It's good to be back.
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