The manager is on holiday for a fortnight, and has left copious written instructions. There is a laminated sheet on how to set the automatic irrigation system, either to run at once or to run overnight on a timer, which is very useful. I have managed to get it to go in the past, though it's so long since I did that I'm not sure I could remember how without the instructions, but in a decade of working in the plant centre nobody has ever shown me how to set it with a delay. A second set of instructions covers the water tank, where it fills from, how to reset the well pump if that stops working, filling it from the pond if you can't get the pump to go, and so on. Again it's good useful stuff to know. The manager showed me how it all worked last Monday, for the first time in ten years, and seemed quite struck when I suggested that it would be helpful to write all that sort of stuff down and give a copy to new members of staff in a folder. A staff handbook, in fact.
A third laminated sheet gives instructions on how to water: water the compost, not the leaves, if something is very dry water more than once, stand everything up before running the overheads, don't run the trees at night in case a nozzle blows, in which case the tank will empty in minutes. The manager showed it to me last Monday and asked whether it was too patronising, and having read it I could truthfully tell him that it was all good advice, though I added the caveat that it would be far better to discuss it with everybody individually rather than just giving them a memo, since the plant centre suffered from an excess of management by note. The manager said that of course he would do that, but my bet is that he didn't. I rather suspect that we were given detailed written instructions not because he believed that anybody would do anything any differently as a result of reading them, but so that he could prove to the owners that he had told us what to do before going away, so if anything went wrong it was down to us and not his fault.
I said as much to the Systems Administrator, who briefly switched back into management analytical mode, and said the issue was that when managers went on holiday they had two choices, to delegate their management function downwards or to temporarily shift it upwards. The problem in our case was that the manager couldn't do either. He doesn't have a number two, and the proprietors don't want that level of detailed physical involvement on a daily basis. The owner is actually pretty hands-on in the tea room, but I don't suppose she knows how the irrigation system works.
There is also a lever arch file with a section for each of us, listing our jobs while the manager is away. Mine is to keep the end table ornamental displays topped up, to disentangle the climbers which have grown into each other, and to cut back a shelf of heathers. I started with the end tables, thinking I might as well save the climbers for a wet day since they're under cover, and I couldn't see what was wrong with the heathers as they were, though I'll have to decapitate them at some point. I didn't get very far. Thankfully we had a tea shop girl, but apart from that there were only two of us in, and my colleague nominated me to man the till for the morning by dint of disappearing out of the shop and leaving me there.
The promised (or threatened, depending on your point of view) rain never materialised, and as the day grew hotter and sunnier my colleague seemed happier to let me work outside while he took over in the shop. He appeared to have spent part of the morning doing tables of his own, rather than sweeping down the shrub beds, and had used up the trolleys of plants in full flower that I'd had my eye on. There isn't an abundance of material to work with at this time of year, but I found some pink lacecap hydrangeas and hostas that were worthy of a more front-line position, and was quite pleased with a mixture of spiky evergreen foliage and allium seed heads.
I went to help a customer look for a particular clematis, which we turned out not to have, and discovered that the large flowered hybrids in that part of the alphabet had grown into each other so much that you couldn't pick an individual pot up. On that basis I think tidying the climbers had better rise up my list of things to do, rain or no rain, since if customers can't even lift the pots we won't sell any.
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