Waking up when the alarm went off at six and realising that I was due to spend a day in the plant centre with a cold was not a moment of unalloyed joy. Still, it is probably safer to be sub-par in charge of plants than if I were still having to make decisions about the ramifications of the Eurozone crisis.
We were peacefully watering when at 9.15am the phone rang. I answered it, and it was The Lady Who Wants 16 Lavenders, which made two moments of not unalloyed joy in one morning. She and I have a history going back about 3 weeks. She spoke originally to a colleague of mine, who palmed her off on (sorry, passed her on to) me, on the grounds that I was going to be at work the next day and he wasn't. He did warn me she sounded dotty. She wanted some lavender for a hedge, but didn't know how many plants, so he told her the correct spacings and left her to measure the length of hedge, work out the number of plants and call me the next day. I was then to call the supplier and place the order. I never get involved in ordering, so the supplier has no idea who I am, but my colleague thought it would be fine. The Lady rang me the next day and said she wanted 16 plants. My colleague had already quoted her a price, which seemed to me unwise when we didn't know how large the plants would be or how much they'd cost us, but I couldn't help that. I assured her that we would honour my colleague's quoted price, assuming we could get plants in 1L pots, and rang the supplier.
The woman I had been told to ring said she didn't know if they had the plants, and she would have to speak to somebody called Carl and check. I asked her if she could ring me back to confirm the plants were available, and she said she would, and didn't. The next time I saw my colleague I updated him on progress to date and gave the paperwork back to him. The next week The Lady Who Wants 16 Lavenders rang me again, to find out about the whereabouts of the lavenders, and I had to apologise and explain that I knew no more than when I last spoke to her. It transpired that her gardener had hurt his back, and we had a very confusing conversation at the end of which I though we'd established that she definitely wanted the plants, but wasn't sure when given the lack of a gardener, and that we would try to get the plants for her with no obligation, and if she decided she couldn't take them we would just put them into general stock. I thought that was pretty good of us, given that lavender is a tricky thing to nurse through winter in a black plastic pot and get looking nice for sale come next spring, and we didn't especially want 16 of them for stock.
She rang again this morning to say that her gardener was now better, and she wanted to place an order for the plants, which is what I thought she did last Monday. She wanted to know when the plants would be in, and I apologised and explained that I would have to find out and ring her back, as I only worked part time and hadn't been at work at all since the last day we spoke, so didn't know until I'd checked if we were able to get the plants. I don't know if she had expected me to be there 24/7, working on sourcing her lavenders, but she seemed to find my ignorance quite incomprehensible. I promised her I would find out. As soon as the call ended I asked the manager, who seemed not to know anything about it. Three quarters of an hour later the phone rang again, and it was The Lady Who Wants 16 Lavenders. She had been engaged on another call, she explained, and thought I might have been trying to call her back. I began to feel as though I were being slowly engulfed by an octopus. I apologised that the manager had been busy with a lorry load of irises that had just arrived (which was almost true, though actually it was just two dutch trollies), and suggested that as I only worked part time and was not going to be in again until the weekend, and given that the manager did the ordering, it would be best if I were to give her the manager's name as a point of contact.
As I was finishing my mid-morning cup of tea, and the manager was just starting his, there was a phone call for him. It was the Lady Who Wants 16 Lavenders. I had tried to warn him. I must speak to my colleague when I next see him, and suggest (forcefully) that he should not involve me in any more customer orders from suppliers. I can't keep track of what's happening when I'm sometimes not in for a week at a time, and it makes us look unprofessional, and causes me more stress than I think my hourly rate warrants. If I wanted stress I could still be paid to worry about the Eurozone crisis.
The phone rang again. It was a sweet-sounding old (from his voice) boy who had bought a long handled brush for cleaning the cracks between paving stones, made by my least favourite tool company. The first time he used it the handle fell off, and when he looked at it the head had only been held on to the shaft by a staple. I looked at the ones in the shop and sure enough they were only stapled on. He lived quite a way away, and didn't really want to have to drive over to bring it back. I decided that he was genuine and gave him a refund over the phone. In fact, it would have been a simple task to put a screw in to hold the head and handle together, but only if you had a drill, and a screw, and a screwdriver, and either strong hands to hold the work while you drilled or else a vice, and he may not have had any of those things, and anyway why should you have to mend something you have just paid £9.95 for that broke the first time you used it.
Then I went and potted irises, which was restful in comparison.
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Monday, 22 August 2011
Saturday, 20 August 2011
the trowel that was lost is found
My lost trowel has turned up. I kind of assumed that it would, and so after searching for it for a while have been using my second best trowel until it did. I found it in a flower bed where I was working a couple of weeks ago, under a bucket of weeds that the Systems Administrator had moved there to clear the lawn for mowing.
In an ideal world every tool would have its place, and be put back there after use, so that I knew where to find them and never wasted time wandering around looking for them. If I were feeling especially retro and borderline OCD I could even paint their outlines by each hook on the wall of the shed. In the kitchen every utensil does actually have a designated place (though without the stencilled outlines). This is essential because both of us use the kitchen, and the system works most of the time, with minor glitches, like when I put the pyrex dish with the rim out in the front garden full of honey cappings for the bees to clear and forgot about it for a fortnight, and the time the Systems Administrator thought that maybe you could apply grout using an icing piping set. (You can't, but I have never been any good at icing anyway so that wasn't a great loss).
With my garden tools I just depend on remembering where I last left them, and if I can't remember that I try to think where I was working recently and look there. Normally I can find them. Sometimes they are in the hall, which is not very tidy. It's unfortunate that due to the eccentric design of the house the back door is at the front of the house in full line of sight, instead of being decently tucked away down a corridor that I could fill with garden clutter, and that visitors would have no reason to enter. When visitors are expected I tidy the tools away, and sometimes I am so pleased with the result that I vow to try and keep the tools in the (integral) garage, or the shed. Access to the garage from the house is through the laundry, down a flight of very narrow stairs and through a sliding door that sticks, so not tip-top convenient, and so keeping the tools in the garage is fine in nice weather, when I don't mind leaving the up-and-over door open, but no so good on cold, wet or windy days when it would be better to keep the outside door shut, especially since the battery in the doofer that lets you remotely open and shut the door from the garden ran flat, and neither of us have got round to getting it a new one. Keeping them in the shed is OK, except that the shed is extremely full of other things, and it's a faff to climb in there to get tools and put them away when you are using them all the time. Less frequently used kit does live in the shed, but it's nice to have trowel, secateurs and keeling mat to hand.
The trowel is not a thing of beauty, and I cannot imagine it featuring in photographs of covetable garden tools in the shopping pages of one of the glossy garden magazines. It has a black plastic handle, with a hole at one end intended to hang it up by, which has got two bits of gravel permanently jammed in it. The handle is moulded with finger grips beneath, and a depression on top that fits the thumb. The hole with the gravel in, and the other end of the handle where the blade fits are orange, which has faded to a dodgy shade of apricot. The blade is stainless steel, it says so in the middle of the upper surface. It is quite broad, and looks as though it might be clumsy to use, but isn't. It is fairly sharp. There is no brand name anywhere on the trowel, and we got it in B&Q several years ago. Despite its total lack of looks or cachet, it sits well in the hand, and is extremely comfortable to use. The second best trowel is identical in all respects, including the gravel stuck in the hole in the handle, except that one of us has used it for some unsuitable purpose, probably to lever up a paving slab or other heavy object, and bent it so that the blade is virtually parallel to the handle instead of being at a more comfortable 20 degrees upwards tilt.
I did once buy a posh trowel at the Chelsea Flower Show. It had a wooden handle, and a cute brass ring around the base of the handle where the blade fitted. It turned out to be utterly inadequate for the actual task of gardening, or at least tending anything bigger than a Wandsworth window box. The brass ring was too narrow, and not enough of the wooden handle was encased in it, so that in use the blade and handle began to part company. The Systems Administrator drilled a hole in the brass ring and put a little brass screw through into the wood, but if you didn't happen to have a workshop and know how to do that sort of thing you would have been stuffed. The blade was also made out of a rather soft steel, and after a year or two of use was a lot shorter than when I started using it. It was abandoned in favour of the uglier, more plebiean and much more fit for purpose B&Q alternative, though it may be lurking in the shed somewhere.
The gardening world is beset with brands of tools that look pretty and aren't up to the hard labour of real gardening. We sell one of them at work. As I am about to rubbish their product on the net I won't name them, but they are the ones with the wooden handles and the sign on their stand that says manufacturing tool specialists since 1730 Sheffield England. Their garden tools are mostly made in China nowadays, and I have lost count of the number we've had returned because the blade has bent, or the handle is loose, or a tine has come off. Their salesman said that the bent tools were down to customers using them inappropriately, for levering up paving slabs and suchlike. Now it is true that such things do happen, and if you need to raise the edge of a slab then please use a gemmy and not a garden trowel or fork. But I don't believe that all of those customers who had bought new, shiny and quite expensive stainless steel gardening tools decided to use them the next day to lift paving slabs, and then came straight back to us and lied about what they'd been doing. Avoid.
Anyway, I am happy that my approach that my best trowel must be where I'd last had it, and so would turn up so there was no point in spending ages looking for it and stressing about it, has worked out. After all, I might have tipped it into the compost heap and next seen it in six months time when I turned the compost. Though, the handle being naff plastic and not ash, it would presumably have been fine.
Addendum In reply to the comment. no, the offending brand of tools sold at my place of work is not Spear and Jackson. I am delighted to hear that S&J give good customer aftercare. Indeed, I have one of their lawn edgers and it has been working beautifully for years (though I have not used it to lever up paving slabs yet).
In an ideal world every tool would have its place, and be put back there after use, so that I knew where to find them and never wasted time wandering around looking for them. If I were feeling especially retro and borderline OCD I could even paint their outlines by each hook on the wall of the shed. In the kitchen every utensil does actually have a designated place (though without the stencilled outlines). This is essential because both of us use the kitchen, and the system works most of the time, with minor glitches, like when I put the pyrex dish with the rim out in the front garden full of honey cappings for the bees to clear and forgot about it for a fortnight, and the time the Systems Administrator thought that maybe you could apply grout using an icing piping set. (You can't, but I have never been any good at icing anyway so that wasn't a great loss).
With my garden tools I just depend on remembering where I last left them, and if I can't remember that I try to think where I was working recently and look there. Normally I can find them. Sometimes they are in the hall, which is not very tidy. It's unfortunate that due to the eccentric design of the house the back door is at the front of the house in full line of sight, instead of being decently tucked away down a corridor that I could fill with garden clutter, and that visitors would have no reason to enter. When visitors are expected I tidy the tools away, and sometimes I am so pleased with the result that I vow to try and keep the tools in the (integral) garage, or the shed. Access to the garage from the house is through the laundry, down a flight of very narrow stairs and through a sliding door that sticks, so not tip-top convenient, and so keeping the tools in the garage is fine in nice weather, when I don't mind leaving the up-and-over door open, but no so good on cold, wet or windy days when it would be better to keep the outside door shut, especially since the battery in the doofer that lets you remotely open and shut the door from the garden ran flat, and neither of us have got round to getting it a new one. Keeping them in the shed is OK, except that the shed is extremely full of other things, and it's a faff to climb in there to get tools and put them away when you are using them all the time. Less frequently used kit does live in the shed, but it's nice to have trowel, secateurs and keeling mat to hand.
The trowel is not a thing of beauty, and I cannot imagine it featuring in photographs of covetable garden tools in the shopping pages of one of the glossy garden magazines. It has a black plastic handle, with a hole at one end intended to hang it up by, which has got two bits of gravel permanently jammed in it. The handle is moulded with finger grips beneath, and a depression on top that fits the thumb. The hole with the gravel in, and the other end of the handle where the blade fits are orange, which has faded to a dodgy shade of apricot. The blade is stainless steel, it says so in the middle of the upper surface. It is quite broad, and looks as though it might be clumsy to use, but isn't. It is fairly sharp. There is no brand name anywhere on the trowel, and we got it in B&Q several years ago. Despite its total lack of looks or cachet, it sits well in the hand, and is extremely comfortable to use. The second best trowel is identical in all respects, including the gravel stuck in the hole in the handle, except that one of us has used it for some unsuitable purpose, probably to lever up a paving slab or other heavy object, and bent it so that the blade is virtually parallel to the handle instead of being at a more comfortable 20 degrees upwards tilt.
I did once buy a posh trowel at the Chelsea Flower Show. It had a wooden handle, and a cute brass ring around the base of the handle where the blade fitted. It turned out to be utterly inadequate for the actual task of gardening, or at least tending anything bigger than a Wandsworth window box. The brass ring was too narrow, and not enough of the wooden handle was encased in it, so that in use the blade and handle began to part company. The Systems Administrator drilled a hole in the brass ring and put a little brass screw through into the wood, but if you didn't happen to have a workshop and know how to do that sort of thing you would have been stuffed. The blade was also made out of a rather soft steel, and after a year or two of use was a lot shorter than when I started using it. It was abandoned in favour of the uglier, more plebiean and much more fit for purpose B&Q alternative, though it may be lurking in the shed somewhere.
The gardening world is beset with brands of tools that look pretty and aren't up to the hard labour of real gardening. We sell one of them at work. As I am about to rubbish their product on the net I won't name them, but they are the ones with the wooden handles and the sign on their stand that says manufacturing tool specialists since 1730 Sheffield England. Their garden tools are mostly made in China nowadays, and I have lost count of the number we've had returned because the blade has bent, or the handle is loose, or a tine has come off. Their salesman said that the bent tools were down to customers using them inappropriately, for levering up paving slabs and suchlike. Now it is true that such things do happen, and if you need to raise the edge of a slab then please use a gemmy and not a garden trowel or fork. But I don't believe that all of those customers who had bought new, shiny and quite expensive stainless steel gardening tools decided to use them the next day to lift paving slabs, and then came straight back to us and lied about what they'd been doing. Avoid.
Anyway, I am happy that my approach that my best trowel must be where I'd last had it, and so would turn up so there was no point in spending ages looking for it and stressing about it, has worked out. After all, I might have tipped it into the compost heap and next seen it in six months time when I turned the compost. Though, the handle being naff plastic and not ash, it would presumably have been fine.
Addendum In reply to the comment. no, the offending brand of tools sold at my place of work is not Spear and Jackson. I am delighted to hear that S&J give good customer aftercare. Indeed, I have one of their lawn edgers and it has been working beautifully for years (though I have not used it to lever up paving slabs yet).
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