The watering at work took until nearly ten o'clock, as we tried to water things that needed watering, and avoid those that didn't. At the end of it we told each other that there were bound to be some pots we'd missed that were dry, as there always are, but we'd done the best we could.
Then we finished putting plants out for sale, that were delivered on Friday, or had come across from the reserve tunnel on the far side of the car park (The Other Side). We didn't have a list of jobs to do from the manager, because he was off sick at the end of last week, but it was fairly obvious that that needed doing. Undeterred by my young colleague's unfortunate experience yesterday, I tried contacting some people who were down on our list as wanting plants which had become available.
This met with mixed success. The only person I actually managed to speak to thanked me for ringing him, but had just been out for his annual birthday nursery visit which he does every year with his brother, and bought one from Robert and Suzette Vernon at the BlueBell Nursery. BlueBell is a lovely firm, and I have bought things from them myself, while the Vernons when you meet them at RHS shows are the nicest people you could imagine, so I can't grumble about that. It goes to show that it is no good listing stuff and expecting customers to wait until the point in the year when you have three specimens in stock. You need to have it in order to sell it.
All my other phone calls ended in an answering machine. I wish that people would give their names as part of their recorded message. If you are calling somebody you don't know, and wouldn't recognise their voice, then 'Hello, we can't take your call, please leave your message after the beep and we'll call you back' is not helpful, leaving a residual doubt in the caller's mind whether they have dialled correctly, or are leaving a message on the machine of a bewildered third party that their Actinidia kolomikta has now arrived.
I wish we had a better system for matching incoming plants to customer requests. Some varieties seem to have come and largely gone again without anyone spotting that somebody who left their details in March wanted three of them. It would help if the manager would circulate lists of what has come in, but he doesn't. Occasionally I ask, and am rewarded with the sight of one delivery note, but it never develops into a system that lasts. In an ideal world it would be automated, but that would need our computer system to be a quantum beyond where it is now. The boss would never try to do it, which is probably just as well since in the real and not ideal world any attempt would almost certainly turn into a miniature version of the BBC digital archive or NHS national patient database projects.
Looking at the list I decided that the best route to success, ordering plants from us, was to order just one or order over two hundred pounds worth. Put in a big order and you will receive the personal attention of a member of staff, who will keep the paperwork relating to your order in a folder, and chase the manager with requests for Euphorbia mellifera, or two dozen Penstemon 'Sour Grapes', or whatever it is you are after. You will be very happy provided you stick to your contact and don't come in on a day when they aren't working and expect anybody else to know anything about it. Three different people look after customer orders, and they all have their own folders and methods of doing paperwork.
If you just want one plant you will go down on the list by the till, and there is a sporting chance, though no more, that when and if it turns up I, or one of my colleagues, will contact you about it. The psychological difficulty comes when you want two or three. Should I risk calling you on a Sunday, when the manager isn't there, to tell you that your one Euphorbia has now arrived, or will I hold back in case you give me a hard time about when you can expect to see the Penstemon that you've been waiting for since March? If you ever do shop from a small family firm like ours, it will pay you to be as nice and polite to the staff as you can be, even when they seem incompetent or half-witted. Once you get a reputation for being a horrible customer to speak to, everybody will leave someone else to be the person that has to pick up the phone to you, and you will go to the back of the queue for everything. Cultivate a name for being a lovely customer, and staff will be jostling to grab you the nicest plant. This is not directly related to how much you spend. We aren't on commission, and have feelings just like everybody else. Five minutes speaking to somebody nice beats a phone call to a sour-tongued, blustering bully any day of the week, even if they are going to spend a hundred pounds instead of £11.85.
Late in the afternoon the owners returned from their holiday. As I left the office I could hear the boss berating my young colleague that nobody had checked the e-mails today. When I got home I had to water all my own pots, and finally sat down at twenty to eight, having left the house at half past seven this morning. Only one more weekend to go of six o'clock finishes, thank goodness.
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