My drive to work through the back lanes of the Tendring peninsular and across Constable country was very beautiful, with brilliant winter light shining across the freshly ploughed fields, and birds silhouetted against a blue sky. Winter can be a lovely season in the UK, when it is not raining, or foggy.
The day got off to a quiet start, cleaning up yet more trolleys of herbaceous plants which I had remembered to put under cover yesterday afternoon, so that they were not frozen. In fact, the trolley load which had been in an unheated greenhouse was slightly frozen. The irrigation system has been drained down for the winter, to avoid the risk of the pipes freezing and bursting, and a tub of water left in the polytunnel on the far side of the car park for dunking any stray dry pots was covered in a layer of ice.
The mood was only slightly soured by an outstanding till error from last Wednesday. It was nothing to do with me, because I wasn't there, but preyed on the mind of my colleague who had been in that day, then not again until this morning. We really ought to have modern tills that record which staff member processed each transaction, as nobody could remember or was owning up to this particular muddle.
Nerves became more jangled after the owner called over the radio to say that she had reserved two willow trees for somebody who was coming in today to collect them, so could we get them ready by the till. My colleague who was already stressed about the till error went to get them, and came back saying she could only find one. I went to have a look, as did my other colleague, and we too drew a blank.
The normal procedure with reserved plants is that they are taken off sale, unless they are large specimens too heavy to lift. We used to put labels on reserved trees with the customer's name on, and leave them where they were, but too many reserved plants were found to have mysteriously vanished when people came to collect them, and we had to conclude that other customers, if that was the last specimen left, were not above removing the name tag and adding the reserved plant to their own shopping. This was always embarrassing, and doubly so when it happened to people who had driven all the way from Romford or Norfolk. However, the owner had left the reserved willows out for sale with the other trees instead of putting them in the special area for reserved trees.
The owner was first of all disbelieving, and then cross, that one of her reserved trees had vanished. She found a couple of alternatives that her friend might accept instead of the second willow, and said that if not we would have to order another willow, and that we were to apologise profusely. The three trees stood outside the back of the shop all day waiting for the owner's friend, who did not come to collect her willows after all.
Fellow members of the hunting, shooting, fishing and landowning fraternity do like to feel that they are getting a personal service from the proprietors, but it would be so much more efficient if they would just deal with the plant centre staff like all the other customers. We know what we're doing. Reserved plants are more likely to end up safely put aside, and an order placed in the normal way during working hours and written down on the main list with all the other orders is honestly much more likely to be met than one placed verbally at a chummy dinner party.
Later on the owner discovered that the dishwasher had not been working since last week, and that nobody had told her. I'd got to the end of the list of herbaceous plants to clean up by that point, and had to go outside and deadhead pansies in the twilight until she'd gone, to escape from the escalating level of stress in the shop.
When I left to go home at a quarter past four I had to scrape a thin layer of ice off the car windscreen. That's a record so far for this winter.
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