Business sucks

but small business sucks more, something I get periodic reminders of.

From Cat, of course, who gets the visceral reminders.

At her current job, her employer was hospitalised for pneumonia a month ago (plus kidney failure and other complications that havent been communicated), and is having a very shakey, slow recuperation - being an elderly (well older than me anyway!) diabetic smoker who doesn't keep up with his medication and regularly ODs on sugar, this probably isn't exactly astonishing, but it looks like he won't be up to daily appearances at the shop til maybe Valentines Day.

The problem with that is, he doesn't have a 2ic, and hasn't trained anyone to take over several of the more important bits of the job - like, ordering supplies, a fairly critical feature for floristry!, and sending out billing for regular contracts etc*. Worse than that, he has more-or-less delegated his authority to run the place to -two- people, one of his florists and the, umm, I'm not quite sure what her job is but I'd call her floor-manager.

One of the results of that is that things fall between the cracks regularly, but that is tolerable. More or less tolerable anyway.

The bigger problem is that neither is temperamentally suitable to manage - the floor manager is a wind-up merchant, someone who is perpetually agitated and tries to spread that agitation to everyone she works with, and is apparently feeling severely threatened by Cat (with her furrin experience an' book-larnin' an' stuff I guess). The senior florist, on the other hand, seems to only be able to work on the threshold of perpetual crisis - he puts off everything until the last minute, so is always putting himself under maximal pressure.

Of course, if he cocks up anything, what could be a minor & correctable hiccup turns into epic disaster, usually with knock-on effects on several other projects/items. I've worked with project managers like this, myself - briefly! - and I recall the enormous frustration and stress it generates.

How long Cat will last like this, I don't know. Possibly she will last til the owner returns, but it seems unlikely. She is talking about starting her own business: she perceives a market opening in the largest mall in the city, which has no floristry on offer, and if she can drum up some government grants for startup money, I think she'll try to arrange to get a stall or cart there to explore that.


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*to be fair part of that problem is that he had to fire his bookkeeper for being crooked (and also enormously annoying), and hadn't found a replacement when he got laid low ... but he hadn't exactly made it a priority either.