Even though I wasn't working yesterday I couldn't quite escape work. I got back from a trip into Colchester to find an e-mail from the owner asking whether I recollected carrying out a sale on Friday for sixty five pounds something, which had been put through the credit card machine as six hundred and fifty something. I couldn't, and I didn't think it was me. I always look carefully from till to credit card machine and back again when I'm inputting card transactions, and again at the merchant's copy of the slip when I press the button to say that it's OK, tear it off and put it in the till. This is largely to protect myself, since I remember the time that a former colleague managed to put through a hundred pounds odd of hedging as a credit card charge of one pound. She was mortified when the mistake was discovered, and wrote the owners a cheque for the difference. They never cashed it, but hung on to it for ages, and I didn't fancy doing a couple of days' work for free to compensate for a fat finger error at the till. The other reason I am hot on checking and double checking is out of long habit in my former life. Over-charging a garden centre customer by six hundred pounds is deeply embarrassing and unprofessional, and shouldn't happen, but not nearly as catastrophic as buying a million BP when you meant to buy a hundred thousand. Later on the owner e-mailed again saying that one of my colleagues had confessed that it was probably him.
My working on Friday instead of Saturday seems to have caused confusion all round. The person who obligingly swapped with me spent Friday and yesterday thoroughly bewildered about what day it was, and somebody who should have been at work yesterday forgot to go in and was an hour late. Apparently, having spent a day working with me on Friday he was convinced that Saturday must be Sunday, and was happily pottering about at home until it struck him that the radio programmes were not right for a Sunday. He told the owner that his car had broken down, but of course it meant that he wasn't there first thing to help with the watering.
It was a beautiful sunny day, and I got rather hot weeding the geraniums. We were quite busy. There were the usual customers asking for things now that we sold out of months ago, and won't get again until the spring, like Iberis, but we seemed to have a reasonable quantity of things that people wanted, which will please the boss. I am still mystified why we don't have some of the plants that are in flower now, such as Gaura, also rather miffed about it, since I'm doing a talk next week on seasonal planting and am starting to wonder what I'm going to illustrate it with, when we are out of stock of quite a lot of it. The manager is back from his holidays tomorrow, so I'm hoping the plant orders will come flooding in during the next ten days.
The pea hen and her chick were hanging around the plant centre, making really determined efforts to get into the shop. She is large enough to trigger the motion sensors that open the doors, so even with the doors left shut she can get in. Apparently the dog is teaching her remaining puppy bad habits as well. The pair of them were caught the other day walking together down the road.
Addendum The Systems Administrator is slowly on the mend, and made it as far as the village today to buy supplies. A group of them have Test tickets starting on Thursday, so the SA needs to be fit by then to travel as far as Lords.
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