The holidays are definitely over, to judge from the volume and snarl-up of traffic at the Manningtree railway crossing. I was five minutes late for work, and made a mental resolution that I would have to wind my alarm clock setting back from 6.15am to 6.00am (which I have now done). Even getting up at quarter past, it is still virtually dark, which is rather depressing, and I had to stir around in the pile of gardening clothes at the end of the bed trying to identify my work trousers by touch. The days do shorten most rapidly around the time of the equinox, so I suppose that given a few more weeks the sense of collapsing day length will get less acute. Plus I will have had longer to get used to the idea.
We finally have new telephones at the plant centre. After months of difficulties answering calls, where we couldn't hear the person at the other end of the line at all, while they could hear us going Hello? Hello? or where the line broke up so badly that the conversation ran along the lines of I'm sorry, the line is really bad, could you repeat the name of the plant, sorry, could you spell that, sorry, I didn't catch your name, we have new phones that make both ends of the conversation audible to the other. And don't arbitrarily refuse to let you make outgoing calls. Or cut you off in mid-flow if you stand in the wrong place.
They have many, many more features than we have worked out how to use. The handbook covers making internal calls, which we never need to do because we all have radios, but doesn't say how to transfer calls from one handset to another at all. Indeed, we haven't yet managed to tell what number each phone is. The person who was responsible for sourcing the new miracle technology wasn't at work today, while his deputy who was supposed to teach the rest of us didn't seem to know too much about it, beyond saying that she'd programmed all the phones to be different colours to differentiate them. Colour coded phones make me think vaguely of Play School. Where's the manager? Oh, he's on the Red phone. One of our suppliers rang for him, and I had to explain that I couldn't transfer the call, and would have to go and physically locate him. The supplier was quite good natured about this. There seems to be a strong inverse correlation between enthusiasm for plants versus technology, so maybe having customers that are unable to operate their own telephone system is par for the course in his experience.
Apart from that it rained, and not many customers came. Takings were boosted by someone ringing to pay for a gigantic mail order consignment which my absent colleague had assembled and quoted for, including delivery. However, when his deputy (in mail order as in phones) rang our usual courier company it turned out that they didn't even deliver to the Isle of Man. I think that by close of play she had managed to find someone who would take the plants for within the amount of money we'd charged the customer. As she packaged up the plants through the course of the day a sizeable collection of large and odd shaped boxes built up around our office area. I hope they get there intact.
The cafe was very quiet, and the girl running it today wanted to use our office area to work in. I don't know what she is working at, but she had a small laptop she needed to plug in. The manager was reluctant to give up his desk, which is understandable, and wanted the cafe girl to stay in her part of the shop. The office was almost completely full of boxes by lunchtime anyway. The cafe people have got a very stylish but heavy wooden A board, announcing the presence of the cafe. It was already tucked away inside our gate as I went home, and I don't know whether the cafe girl brought it in on her way out, or whether it had been there all day instead of standing on the opposite verge to announce the cafe's presence to passing trade. I don't know if the cafe girl can physically carry it. She isn't very big. I tested the weight after bringing in our sign, out of curiosity, and it is at the upper limit of what I could safely carry across a busy road. True, I am ovet twice her age and not terribly large either, but as Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa put it, strong as a little French horse.
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