Watering The Plastic Plants

   In Florida, while I doing the working mom thing there, I had the chance to work in the floral department. The flower lady's previous assistant had moved on, Valentine's Day was coming, and she needed some extra help. I jumped on the chance, anything to get out from behind the checkstand, and working floral sounded neat, a chance to be creative or something along those lines.

   She really liked me during Valentine's, and so I became a permanent assistant. Well, after all the Valentin'es rush is over, floral became more of 'let's water the live plants.' I never realized how much I sucked at watering plants before this time. The lady  I worked for had a knack; she could tell if a plant was watered enough by how heavy it was. She never messed up, but she was never able to pass this talent off to me. I tried this, and somehow I always ended up with huge puddles underneath the pots. I don't know why, but whenever I watered, there never failed to be puddles. It was a mystery. 

   Still, I kept being her assistant, and I covered for her when she went on vacation or had a day off. They just started keeping a towel at the floral counter for me so I could clean up my mess. And during one of these vacation periods, I was happily over-watering all the plants that we had out. There were about six plants that  I had never seen before, little tree-type plants, but we were always getting new stuff in and I figured they had just come in and the produce manager had put them out for me. He was often doing things like that for us; he was a pretty great guy. 

   So I was happily drowning this plant when along comes the variety manager and he just has this dumb-founded look on his face, and he demanded to know why I am watering the plants. 

  "Ummm, because I'm supposed too?"

   "You didn't notice the staples?"

    Staples?! Closer inspection of the plant did reveal that there are actually staples in the thing. Okay, that was new, and why would anybody put staples in a plant? So I sitting there scratching my head, trying to figure what is up with this stupid plant, and the variety manager is dragging all the little tree plants away.

   "I'm moving my plants before you ruin them all," he tells me. Yeah, because generally, you don't water fake plants. We all have our 'not the sharpest tool in the shed' moments, and so here's on of mine. To the end of my days at that store, I was known as the girl who watered the fake plants, and considered a menace with the watering can. 

   My floral manager, however, was actually pretty happy about the whole thing. Turns out she hadn't wanted the fake plants there, stealing sales from her real, live product, but was outvoted; she laughed so hard she turned purple. In my defense, I can say I wasn't expecting a bunch of fake plants to be mixed in with the live ones. I was supposed to water all of our product that day.

 Lesson learned; keep your eyes out for staples.