Blaming the Florist

Those of you who have been able to figure out what my current line of work is know that my office has a great deal of professional interaction with florists. Most florists are a dime a dozen, and I have few reservations about proclaiming that it doesn't take that much talent to be a florist.

Of course, that would require me to exclude Bob, the florist across the street. As Bob's florist shop is directly across the road from us, we tend to get a lot of floral arrangements from him.

Unfortunately, Bob is a pretty lousy florist. He and his brother used to run a flower shop, but they had a falling out long before I was around, and now they run two different shops on opposite sides of town. Bob's brother does pretty good work. Bob, on the other hand...

Bob is frequently late. Today I got a call five minutes after we opened asking when we were open; he didn't identify himself, but I think he mentioned that he had flowers to bring over, and I figured it out.

Bob frequently overwaters flowers. With regard to the flowers he delivered today (within thirty minutes of when they were needed, mind you), each and every glass vase was completely full of water, and I had to dump half or more of the water out of several just to be able to carry them. One time he delivered this monstrosity shaped like a tractor, and the thing was so badly overwatered that it dripped (as in, shower partially running) for about half an hour, and then continued to drip well into the evening.

Bob expects us to do maintenance on his flowers, moving them to and fro to keep them cool, transporting them when they're clearly beyond our capacity to deal with, et cetera. To the best of my knowledge, Bob is the only florist in the area who engineers such completely outlandish creations, and he's the only one who makes arrangements so large that we have trouble handling them.

So that's my sob story for the day: the little florist who can't, but does anyway.