Reading all of the entries so far, it seems to me that a lot of people managed to get amazing placements for work experience, which would provide a future career opportunity. I suppose it could be said that I did manage to find a placement that was related to my hopes for a career in biology/chemistry, in the same way that a bicycle is related to an articulated lorry by having wheels. After being turned down by several businesses, I ended up at a garden centre
It can be said that my time there was not particularly interesting, the most intellectual activity I performed was learning to work the till for a while. The till itself looked old, probably older than it actually was. I suppose that being stuck in a warm, humid glasshouse for years under the sun’s ultraviolet glare contributed to its prematurely aged plastic, however, the damage went deeper. When I was first shown how to use it I was told that a “rubber-band-thing” had broken an indeterminate while ago, so that the company copy of the receipt had to be manually wound on every now and then.
Despite its faults, this worn cash register still managed to rake in more money in a single day than I have ever seen before. This was the first big surprise for me, that a type of business I had always assumed was low on the moneymaking could bring in so much of the stuff. It was nearly unheard of for someone to spend less than ten pounds. Many of the customers paid for their goods with twenty pound notes – the last time I saw one of these was when my dad sold his car and was paid with them. This made change in the till hard to come by, and often customers had to be asked to pay for things in coins because there was nothing lower than a ten pound note, except for a ton of five pence pieces, in the till.
Other than manning the till, my main job was “upkeep of plants”, as the trident form describes it. This involved spending quite a while every day examining each plant in the shop and removing dead bits, as well as watering them. I now wonder if the main purpose of growing flowers is to have something which looks nice, or something to keep you busy removing all of the irritating little dead parts which “customers don’t like”. This was the second surprise whilst I was there. I come from a family that tends to be against unnecessary waste. So, when I was told to remove entire trays of plants because they were slightly “yellow”, or “a bit too leggy”, I was amazed. When a plant was condemned to death like this, it was either thrown into the hedge in the far corner of the front area, or put in the “graveyard” by the path towards the nursery, just past the end of the public area of the garden centre. Here lay many plants engaged in the various stages of dying slowly in long grass. Indeed, I would say that many looked fine, but they were just not up to “company standards”.
It appeared that I was not up to “company standards” either, although my supervisor neglected to even hint at my failings until Friday morning, when I was told by her that she felt I was, and had been, working too slowly. I suppose it was partly because of my reluctance to waste things that, to me, looked fine that she saw me as wasting time. It looked from her demonstration on Friday morning that if it took more than two seconds to remove any dead flowers from a plant, I was supposed to just remove the entire stalk, even if had loads of buds yet to open on it.
When, at five o’clock, it came to filling in my employer assessment form, I had the biggest surprise of the whole work experience week. My supervisor told me that she felt I was almost deliberately being “slow and sloppy”. I was so astonished that I did not say anything. In fact, I felt that I had worked really hard all week, so when I went home that evening with a form filled with “variable” for most of the categories, I was very disappointed. I thought it was a shame, because before Friday I had not minded work experience, and I found all of the other people who worked there pleasant to work with. This taught me the most important lesson of work experience: life is tough.
It’s not as if my career aim was to be a menial labourer in a garden centre anyway.
Hey, my name is Ryan Wilden and my work placement is at Tredworth Junior School in the city of Gloucester and I will be a classroom assistant for a year 3 and a year 6 class.