Today passed in part in an air of barely suppressed chaos. One of my colleagues had booked a holiday, arranged with another colleague to swap working days to cover, and then changed her holiday dates. The person she swapped with didn't realise that the dates had altered, so wasn't expecting to come in today. The manager, detecting at the eleventh hour that we were about to be down to two people in the plant centre today, arranged for the woman who normally works on the other side but can operate the till to come in for an extra day as cover. The owner decided to spend most of the day working in the shop so that she could run the tea room, and co-opted her twelve year old daughter to help with the teas. In theory we had enough people for a Monday.
In theory we had. But then the manager decided to leave the third staff member over on the other side, where she had more than enough jobs to be getting on with, and working with the owner is not as slick as when it is another regular member of staff. I expect that's largely down to lack of practice, but I think it's also a difference in mindset. It's her business and she employs us, so isn't used to the idea that if she wants to go to the office for ten or even five minutes at a point where she is minding the tills, she needs to tell us that she's going and then maybe wait until we've finished talking to a customer and can come and take over from her. Several times today I went out of the shop leaving her there, and returned to find nobody from the home team except for the twelve year old, and a customer waiting at the till. And the staff are accustomed taking it in turns to eat lunch, so that there will always be a minimum of two people on duty, one to operate the till and the other to help customers and answer the phone. That's a bore for the person who goes last and ends up sitting down to their lunch at quarter to two, but it's necessary to keep things ticking over smoothly. The owner, seeing a lull in trade, announced when the manager said he would go for his lunch that she would go for her's as well. The lull didn't last.
Still, I'm pleased to see her out there. Management by walking about is a very good way for anybody in charge to find out what is going on in a business, and it will be instructive for the owner to see how busy we get on the ground at this time of year, and how it is that phone calls get missed or plants not put out for sale the moment they are ready.
The dog added to the air of faint disorder by persistently coming into the shop, and walking around the kitchen and under the tables in the tea area, a would-be snapper up of unconsidered trifles. The owner exclaimed each time that the dog was supposed to be in the house, and removed her, and the dog escaped from the house every time and was back in the tea room. The daughter protested that the dog was not doing any harm and should stay. The manager and I said that the environmental health inspector would not like it, if they dropped by and found a dog in the kitchen. I heard the owner going through our operating procedures with the catering student yesterday, and whatever risk assessment form they were filling in said that they wore aprons. It did not say that we had a dog in the kitchen. One hopeful couple asked me if I could make them some tea, at a point where the owner was not there, but I had to tell them that I had not passed my food hygiene exam and had got compost on my shirt, and that while I ate my lunch in this state every day and hadn't died yet, I didn't think it would be acceptable for professional catering purposes.
The telephones have become practically inaudible at the top end of the plant centre, unless it was just my handset. Incoming calls were very faint, and kept breaking up. That's difficult at the best of times, but particularly so when you are trying to discover the name of the person calling, and the name of the plant they are looking for, as you can't fill in proper names from the context like you can with more general chit-chat. Two of the three doors to the shop aren't working properly either, and the person from the door company the manager spoke to last week while the boss was in Cornwall was spectacularly rude and unhelpful on the phone. As I said, it was a day of barely suppressed chaos.
One woman came into the shop with a pained air and said that there was nobody out there to help her at all, which was true, as I was on the till and the manager was at his desk telephoning orders for plants through to suppliers. I offered to help, and she wanted some bare root quick thorn dug up. I bagged up a bundle of ten hawthorn whips for her, and she and her husband began to quiz me about how large they would grow. They were happy to hear that they would get to eight feet as required, and asked how quickly they would get there. They were not happy with my reply, as it turned out they wanted them to get to that height this summer. I explained that almost nothing newly planted would be likely to make that much growth in its first few months, and that we did have some large specimen evergreens suitable for screening, but that they would be much more expensive. She said could I leave the hawthorn in its bag for now, as she'd probably have it anyway, and otherwise she'd let me know, but could she see the other plants as well, so I showed them some Italian grown Photinia x fraseri 'Red Robin' and pointed them in the direction of the bamboos. Later in the day I thought to go and check that she had taken the hawthorn, and there it still was, sitting in its bag. I heeled it in again. When you next read an article in the Telegraph or the Times by some journalist grumbling about how awful, rude, ignorant, useless and unhelpful shop assistants are nowadays, remember that they have to deal with some pretty stupid and godawful customers sometimes.
I have been admiring the emerging new leaves on a larch that is reserved for somebody behind the shop. At first they looked like tiny green pegs, on close examination like minute stubby bright green shaving brushes. Today they were visibly longer than at the start of the weekend, morphing from stubs into needles. They are extraordinarily pretty.
Now I have a whole six days to spend on our garden, with almost nothing booked in my diary. Admittedly I have some domestic errands to run, some of which won't wait, but the weather forecast is favourable for outside work and I should get lots done. I cross my fingers mentally when I say that, since the last time I had a run of intensive gardening planned I managed to ram a rose thorn into my knuckle at the end of day one, and spent the rest of the week with a partially useable and very painful hand the size of a potato, feeling totally zonked from the horsepill sized antibiotics.
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