vacancies

The owner is advertising for staff, after saying last Monday that there was no point until September.  That's not to say she has placed ads in Horticulture Week, but she has put notices by the till.  One vacancy is for a Plant Centre Assistant, full or part time, must work Saturdays, horticulture qualification, keen interest in plants.  That's all fair enough, but the other is for someone to run the shop and cafe, keen interest in plants essential.  I'd have thought that a food hygiene certificate and a keen interest in homeware and greetings cards was more to the point.

I had to serve a cafetiere of filter coffee while my young colleague was at lunch, and scrubbed my hands vigorously with a nail brush under the hot tap, but still had compost under my fingernails. Let's hope the new Plant Centre Assistant joins up on the basis of being willing to do the cafe when required.  I also foresee a grand spat between whoever they take on to run the shop and the existing member of staff who, although nominally nothing to do with the shop, moves the displays around on a weekly basis.

The bare root irises arrived for potting, but I wasn't allowed to go and help pot, because we needed two people in the plant centre.  Which we did, especially with the cafe, but it was a shame, as I like potting.  The young gardener never made it to work at all because his car had broken down, so the manager was one experienced potter down, although the proprietors' son, a potting novice, helped in the afternoon.

The cold tap in the staff room has been getting stiffer and stiffer to turn on and off, to the point where it has become impossible.  There are a couple of possible solutions to this problem.  The one most people would opt for is to get the tap mended or replaced.  The one we have adopted is to turn the tap off at the stopcock, which entails crawling into a narrow space under the work top between the fridge and the wall.  I am not awfully good at clockwise versus anti-clockwise at the best of times, let alone while squeezed into an awkward hole, and I wasted a good deal of water before managing to turn the tap off again, because initially I opened the stopcock to full on instead of closing it.

It felt very quiet, but the end of day sales total was surprisingly good, given how dry it is.  Maybe the economic statistics indicating the beginnings of an upturn are right.