My young colleague who is nominally working out her notice after resigning several weeks ago did not turn up to work this morning, and did not call to say when or whether she was coming in. The owner tried ringing her several times and left messages, but got no response. That left us with two people to run the plant centre for the day. The owner could have cancelled her Sunday lunch with the boss's parents, but didn't. At least we had a teashop girl, and there was virtually no watering to do, what with last night's torrential rain, and humidity so high that the plants could scarcely transpire if they'd wanted to.
It is hard work coping with two, when it's busy. After a slow start the sun came out, and so did the customers. It was just as well the phones scarcely rang, otherwise we wouldn't have coped. As it was we just about managed, my colleague only had to answer one phone call during her unpaid lunch break, and the queues at the till weren't too bad, though I felt mean sending people off to look for plants by themselves, because I couldn't leave the shop to go with them and show them where things were. A young woman left to fend for herself trying to find either the rose 'Ruby Wedding' or the camellia of the same name looked particularly doleful as she left empty handed, though I'm pretty sure that we didn't have either, even if a member of staff had been available to help her.
The prize for the silliest (and rudest) customer goes to the elderly party who decided to get her credit card out of her purse while walking up the wooden ramp to the shop, and dropped it so that it fell through the gaps between the planks. She wasn't at all steady on her feet, and why she couldn't have stuck to doing one thing at a time beats me. She arrived at the till flanked by relatives, whose expressions suggested they were having a fun day out with Mrs Soprano, grumbled about the construction of the ramp, and demanded to know whether there was anybody able-bodied to lift or dismantle it to retrieve her card.
I forbore to ask her how much more able-bodied she would like me to be, given that I could lift twenty kilos, and walked twelve miles in an afternoon for fun, and replied that there was nobody there but myself and my sixty-eight year old pensioner colleague who was having lunch. I forgot to count the tea shop girl, but she wouldn't have made any difference. The relatives chorused decisively that it would be impossible to lift the ramp, and had to pay for Mrs Soprano's plants, while she brushed aside my suggestion that we might be able to retrieve the card on Tuesday when there were more people here, saying that was no good and unless she could have it now she would have to cancel it. She was probably right, but I got the feeling she suspected that as soon as she had gone, we would be fishing for it through the gaps with a wire coat hanger.
I got home to find the Systems Administrator sitting outside the front door watching the chickens and looking harassed. In response to my kindly enquiry whether the SA had had a nice day I was told that the saga of domestic collapse continued. It had taken half the morning to mend the veranda door, which came off its runners last night, but not in the way that the SA thought it had, and took ages to fix. Then, just as the SA sat down to watch the chickens, there was a loud crash from my greenhouse as a pane of glass slid out of the roof. The SA had spent the next two hours picking up pieces of toughened glass with pliers. I didn't bother asking whether the SA had had time to order a new telephone, which is one of the other things that broke last week. Looking on the bright side, the reassembled vacuum cleaner worked, and the SA sucked up eight boxes of cat fur from the sitting room floor.
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