We were reduced to two staff members in the plant centre, because somebody called in sick. In a way this was a lucky break for me, because it gave me a cast iron reason to stay in the shop all day, cleaning up pots of iris and geraniums in between transactions on the till, and it was very hot outside. In another way it was rather stressful, because two people is not really enough to operate the plant centre, except in the depths of winter or on very wet days when we only have a handful of customers. What with the till, and the telephone, and the tea room, it is more than a two person job, and that is before anyone has actually gone outside to help a customer find a plant, or advise them on suitable choices for the space they need to fill. The manager is entitled to take an hour and a quarter in breaks, while I as a part-timer get an hour, so that added up to over two hours of the seven hours we were open when there was only one staff member in the plant centre. It isn't really enough, and I could see the disappointment in various customers' eyes as I apologetically pointed them in the right direction to find whatever it was they were looking for, instead of taking them there myself.
The manager drew the short straw and had to run the tea room. It was a rigged selection process, in that I brandished my filthy finger nails and said that it was not right at all for me to be alternating between nursery work and serving refreshments. It isn't, though. If an environmental health officer walked in through the door they wouldn't like it. True, I ate my lunch with the same disgusting fingernails and I haven't shown any signs of food poisoning yet, but rules is rules, and the local paper loves writing up stories about unhygienic cafes. The account of the Chinese restaurant who kept an unsafe barbecue outside where birds could crap on it and rodents run over it was positively lurid. Actually, our barbecue at home lives on the veranda where birds could land on it and rodents could frolic on the grill, and it hasn't hurt us yet, but that's by the by.
The computer in the shop was not working for great parts of the day, refusing to connect to the internal network. This caused great confusion about which of the e-mails that arrived over the weekend had or had not been replied to. I don't know how the network is configured, but that makes it sound as though you can't see on the office computer what has been happening on the shop computer, which seems unhelpful. The woman who works in the office had to call the enterprising bloke with a mohican haircut who provides our computer support, and eventually they got it going, but it doesn't sound as though it's very stable. Something to do with the cable to the shop.
As a consequence of having to earn a crust on Mondays I missed out on a friend's book launch, which was being held in London. So far in my life I have been to two book launches. One was my uncle's memoirs of his life working for R3, which was held in the Austrian Cultural Institute in Knightsbridge. It seemed an appropriate venue since one of his other books is on Schubert, and he briefly worked in Vienna, which remains possibly his favourite city in the world. Besides which, he knows the people at the Institute. I found myself sitting next to the Austrian ambassador, who was wearing the most beautiful shoes and a wonderfully tailored suit, and I was absolutely struck dumb. I could not think of a single sensible thing to say. What's it like being an Ambassador? Do you really serve Ferrero Roche at receptions? We listened to some lieder, there were some short speeches, and the Austrian ambassador departed. The other book launch I attended was held in the Wivenhoe book shop, and was for a little book put out by a local publisher about a small boat. I bumped into somebody I vaguely know via the woodland charity and work, who very cordially invited me to go and look at the wood he and his wife planted on their farm to commemorate the battle of Trafalgar. I meant to take him up on it, but still haven't got round to it.
Tonight's launch is of a book about tube maps, that a friend has written and is self-publishing. He is unusually well-positioned to comment on the subject, having a genuine passion for underground maps, while his day job is as a senior lecturer in cognitive psychology. I'd have loved to go, but couldn't ask for another day off after losing one day already this month to the Tendring Show. The Systems Administrator has gone, to show moral support. It tied in nicely with the last day of the Test against South Africa. Shame England lost resoundingly.
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