Watering in the plant centre this morning I could hear rather frantic quacking from the other side of the wall. The manager told me that there was a mother duck and half a dozen ducklings in the small round pond, and the sides were too high for them to get out. He found a plank of wood and propped it over the edge, but the quacking continued, as while the duck and four of the young ones had climbed out of the pond, two of them hadn't, and were swimming round and round like little wind-up bath toys.
We temporarily abandoned the watering to contemplate the ducks. Shooing them towards the ramp was not very successful, because they swam around the edge even faster, and shot straight under the plank. Catching them as they went past was pretty tricky too, as they jinxed away from our moving hands. We debated whether to fill the pond to the brim, and float them out. They made tiny peeping noises, and I thought they were probably upset, though it was difficult to tell. They were also dabbling experimentally at pieces of duckweed. Eventually one found its way up the plank, but instead of going to join its (still frantically quacking) mother, marched up some steps and set off towards the garden.
The manager, by dint of slowly lowering his hand towards the water, managed to snaffle the other as it went by. As soon as it was put down on solid ground it went waddling off to find mama, while I set off into the garden in pursuit of the absconder. The wandering duckling did not like being followed, and did not want to be caught, scurrying into a large bush. I worked my way round the edge of the bush with a degree of caution, since having to put in the accident book that I'd scratched my eye while crawling through a shrub in pursuit of a duckling would be a ridiculous way to start the week. The errant baby, showing a good turn of speed, toddled through a great arc and found its way back to the main pond, where the rest of its family was swimming, then dithered at the edge for several minutes before summoning the nerve to jump in.
They were very sweet, brown balls of fluff with black stripes on their faces, and incredibly dim. I believe that ducks are the stupidest birds. At any rate they have the smallest brains as a percentage of their body weight (parrots and corvids are top of the tree, though I don't know which would win in an IQ contest).
The telephones were barely working at all. We have roaming handsets, so that we can talk to customers as we run around the plant centre looking to see what is in stock and how much it is, and try and explain over the telephone what the plant looks like and what condition it's in. They are not special, robust handsets designed for the outdoors, but just ordinary ones very similar to the ones we have at home, and I think they find the physical conditions challenging. They kept dropping out of contact with the internal phone network, and cover was desperately patchy, being very weak near the till which is where we keep supplies of scrap paper for making notes, and the list of plants that people are looking for. I had one excruciating conversation that lasted for over ten minutes, most of the dialogue consisting of You're terribly faint...sorry, you're breaking up...I can't hear you...I still can't hear you. I do wish that the owner would get some new phones. Preferably better ones.
One caller was replying to our message left three days ago about sending two hydrangeas to Shropshire, which threw me totally, since the last time I heard we weren't doing mail order again until September, by official decree from the owner. Maybe the owner changed her mind since then, or maybe this was an individual staff initiative to try and increase sales. I do wish we could be run like a business, have a policy, and stick to it until such a time as we have a new policy. It is so confusing, when the phone (which you can scarcely hear) goes and it is people wanting to do things that you didn't think you did. I don't really want to take somebody's details (and payment) for a mail order parcel, and then get a rocket from the owner because the box gets left in a hot warehouse over a weekend, the plants die, the customer demands replacements, we're out of pocket on the plants and an extra set of delivery charges, and why was I doing mail order in August anyway? Equally I don't want to tell customers that we aren't doing mail order until September when one of my colleagues has just told her that we are.
The manager had a nice holiday, though I should think the beneficial effects started to wear off rapidly, as he tried to contend with the great pile of notes, queries, and samples of dead and dodgy plants that awaited him on his return, plus the telephones barely working, and the confusion over mail order. I weighed in with requests for stocks of Gaura, Japanese anemones, Lespedeza, Eucryphia, Salvia uliginosa and Sedum in a zingier colour than white or brownish pink. These are of course all plants I would like for my talk next week, but we need them anyway, because we have so little to offer to any customers who have discovered that their gardens are now completely green, and would like some plants that do something at this time of year.
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