"I want some cheap flowers for my wife..."

After working an 8 hour day alone at my flower shop I was inspired to write a fun blog about the idiotic and down right dumb customers i see on a weekly basis...

Every day for the past four and a half years I have asked myself, “Why am I still working here?” Granted in the past one year i haven't worked nearly as much, at least in the customer service aspect of the store but nonetheless i have been working for my parents shop for almost a full five years. Do you know what type of people order, receive, deliver, grow, or wholesale flowers? I do...

On any particular day I find myself wondering how it is possible for so many people to act with such ignorance, incompetence, and pathetic desperation at the same time they are also wanting to do a “good deed.” For instance, I remember a time when I tried to wire a floral order to an out-of-town florist for a frequent customer of ours. The order was for an arrangement of flowers for $40.00, with no special flowers identified. Within ten minutes I received a “reply” message that stated, “We are unable to fill this order.” I called for clarification and the filling florist shop owner explained, “We have no flowers.” Incredulously, I asked, “You are a flower shop, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes,” she sweetly replied.

“You’re a flower shop, but you have no flowers,” I asked with confusion.

“Yes, that’s right dear.”

Oh jeeze! Can someone explain to me how you can call yourself a “flower shop” but have no flowers? Are there auto parts stores that have no parts for cars? Or clothing stores that don’t sell clothes? I dont think so!...get some fricking flowers.

I love it when the phone rings and someone says, “Hello, I would like to send flowers. Do you deliver?

“Yes sir, we do.”

I spend three or four minutes gathering his billing information, what he wants a card message to read, what he wants to send, and then to whom he wishes to send the flowers.

“And her address, sir?”

“Oh, I don’t know where she lives.”

I mean, really!? What does he think, that I know where she lives, or that the delivery driver knows all the names and addresses of Durham County residents?

In the years I have worked with my parents, I have received at least a dozen calls similar to this:

“I received a beautiful plant from your shop a week ago and it looks terrible today. The leaves are drooping and the flowers are falling off.”

“How often have you watered the plant?”

“Oh, was I supposed to water it?”

Dah!

In addition to the customer service aspect of the retail flower shop, there is the arranging, processing, and delivering of flowers. I never thought that by the time I was nineteen years old I would have lifted the dead heads of multiple corpses to drape flowers in hair or across the heart. Can you even imagine? At those moments, I think, “Elyse, you should be feeling very sad, or sympathetic at very least.” Instead, I am either grossed out by the whole scene, or wishing I could try pinching the dang body to see if it really was once alive and real. Like, I’ll never forget the time I walked into the funeral home to lay a casket spray atop a box only to notice the face of the same old man who had come to order flowers from me the week before! Impossible, he was just here in the shop. I just saw him. The family is just trying to get sympathy from the community. Or maybe he staged the whole thing himself so he can collect his own insurance money. Really, the floral business really makes you wonder about people.

Men come looking hung-over or high in to order flowers because “I fu**ed up real bad,” hoping that tonight they’ll be able to climb back in bed with their wife...I have even had a gentlemen ask if the arrangement is alive. I mean seriously!? Are you seriously asking me if I’m going to send a dead arrangement? And today…Oh, Boy. I stole the title for this non-fiction essayblog right from the mouth of my last customer, today. Can you imagine!

“How can I help you sir?”

“I WANT SOME CHEAP FLOWERS FOR MY WIFE.”

And all this is as if the daily work involved in the floral business is not hard enough. When Fed-Ex delivers twenty four-foot long boxes that I (or we) need to haul through the narrow two foot wide hallway to stack six feet high on our metal table at the back of the shop, it then takes me hours to “process” them. Translated in the most simple of ways, to “process” flowers means to freshly cut the stems ½ inch so they will drink water, and then to drop them into a bucket with fresh water. This does not account for the thousand scratches from rose thorns, the green stains on my hands, my ever broadening shoulders from lifting buckets with water and flowers to place on high shelves and the effects of the Fahrenheit 40 degree cooler the flowers are stored in

Of course, there has been a lot of value to the experiences in the shop. I know how to gracefully handle a rude customer while giving him/her the finger behind my back. I know how to nod my head at the customer who wants to send yellow roses because they mean “I love you,” even though it is red roses that really send that message. And I understand the teamwork required to run a successful business, even if half the employees my parents decide to hire are incompetent. I have learned a lot about working in retail, working as part of a family-owned business, how to balance jobs, schoolwork, and teenage life, and more about flowers than I will ever want to know...yet i still love sending and receiving them (as long as they are not roses). And in (somewhat) retrospect, I'm sure the moms, daughters, and girlfriends that are lucky enough to have a man who sends flowers, are pretty lucky.

I stole this picture from Google, but none of the ones I had was as pretty.

Quote of the moment...

"It is not about possession and limits. It is about giving everything until there's nothing left to give, and then searching and scraping until you find a little bit more." --Harvesting the Heart, Jodi Picoult