Trade ticked along in the plant centre, and I struggled to get to grips with our e-mail system. It's not as though I'm a technophobe who doesn't like using computers, but the plant centre has a weird network that I really don't understand and nobody has ever successfully explained to me, or even tried unsuccessfully to explain. There are multiple e-mail addresses going to different inboxes, a hierarchy of incoming messages so that many of them arrive on the boss's computer who can then redirect them internally, and some computers can't see what messages have been sent on other computers. The owner has recently introduced a procedure for deleting messages once they have been replied to, to try and make sure that incoming missives don't sit around unanswered for days, but it makes picking up on a previous correspondence confusing, to say the least. The whole thing operates on Outlook, a programme I don't use at home.
I needed to find the past e-mails between a customer who had been asking about the availability of various Euonymus and one of my colleagues, because she rang up wanting to buy two each of the varieties he had said we'd got. Unfortunately that was last week, and by today one variety had sold out, but she accepted a substitute when offered one. Our standard mail order delivery charge for an order worth that much was supposed to be twenty per cent of the value of the plants. Neither my colleague who packs the parcels nor the manager knew whether that was going to cover it, but since that's what we say on the website we rounded it up to the nearest five pounds and hoped for the best. The manager said to me anxiously that this was all a bit make it up as you go along, wasn't it, and I agreed that it was. My colleague spent part of the afternoon constructing three strange, dalek shaped parcels. We'll discover in due course if we can really have those shipped to Kent for thirty five pounds.
The gardeners went to cut some more Christmas trees, the owner explaining that she hadn't said before that there would be more because then people wouldn't have bought the first ones. The second scraping of the barrel was not really any worse than the first, and some of the trees were pretty good, though on the large side. However, some were what you could term individualistic takes on the concept of a Christmas tree.
I think the schools must have broken up for the holidays, as the children were around. The girl has started wearing her hair up, and looking quite grown up, but appeared a child again all of a sudden when she came into the plant centre mid afternoon asking whether we'd seen the dogs, because she had lost both of them. We hadn't, but the manager went to help look for them, and they turned up on the far side of the car park. The older one had been digging, but knew she shouldn't have been, and kept wiping her nose on tufts of grass as they came back towards the house. I think that the parental wrath if the daughter had lost both dogs would have been pretty fearsome. I hear the younger dog is not a good influence on its mother, since it is barely house trained and gets away with all sorts of things, which makes the older one think that in that case she can do that too.
I am shortly heading out again for an evening with my colleagues, since it is our staff Christmas meal. Knowing that trade had been tough my colleagues suggested to the owners that we'd be quite happy to have a DIY party, with everyone bringing something. I wouldn't have minded making cheese straws, or nibbles of fish on rye, or even aubergine boreks. However, the owners said it would be easier to go out. I am not sure why it ended up being tonight, and one person can't go because he is going to his aunt's care home's Christmas party, but someone wouldn't have been able to go whenever it was held. I ought to be at a beekeepers' committee meeting, but decided I'd already gone the extra mile for the beekeepers this autumn. The village pub was fully booked, so we have ended up going to a rather nice hotel just across the river. The last thing the local economy needs is small businesses pulling in their horns at the expense of other small businesses, so from a macro-economic point of view it's just as well we're going. And I am looking forward to my parsnip soup and Blythburgh pork.
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