Bless me Father

For I have sinned.Its been several months since my last confession, er, I mean blog post/email to you. I don’t mean to be blasphemous, rather, you can take it as a measure of my self-disgust and guilt at having neglected this particular line of communication. Excuses I have a-plenty.

Take it they are likely to be similar to your own when you are late doing a quote, dodging a phone call ‘cos you couldn’t get to draw up their plan/ price the plants or materials … you get the picture. We are not civil servants. We must make choices. We are measured by our output and are paid accordingly. The market is very fair like that. But whenever we do something, something else doesn’t get done. I’m writing this at 8.20am even though I’ve about 17 items on my things to do list.

Eat a big fat slimed frog first thing every day they say; (i.e. address the hard things first and the rest of the day will be easy by comparison). Think I might have bottled it this morning. I usually get only about half way through my list and kick the unfinished tasks to the next day. Often the same item reappears for weeks on end.

By calling out to a potential customer in the evening time it might mean missing an episode of Hawaii-50, doing it on a Saturday morning might mean skipping your young lads football match. What if he scores and you are not there? But what if you get the job and can now afford to get him those new boots (albeit in a dodgy colour!)? These are our choices.

I’ve 2 reasons for today’s missive. One is to crow about Sanctuary synthetics being one of the main sponsors, along with Bord Bia and Kilsaran, of the forthcoming ALCI awards on the 6th November next. See you there if you are coming along. It’s a chance to put faces to names and my colleagues Dominic, Mary and Ann will be coming along for the jolly. I’ve never been to the National conference centre so that alone should be interesting.

The second reason is, and here comes my best excuse, to explain why I’ve neglected this blog. See, I’ve had this uncomfortable feeling it might not be wise to be so honest and forthright / un-pc. Particularly since these emails are also stuck up on-line on www.thefakegrassman.com for all to see.
I was waiting for my web guy to password protect it. Thanks Shay. So casual browsers, non landscapers and the general public can now all feck off. I’ll say what I like and you can always unsubscribe if offended or simply type “letmein” to check out any and all blog posts. By the way virtually nobody has unsubscribed and analytics shows a healthy 30-40% open rate by the several hundred punters on this list.

Finally as some of you will already know- ‘cos I sent you on some stuff recently- a recent extensive UK survey of garden owners there showed that 74% of respondents HATE looking after their lawns and allegedly 1 in 10 has a synthetic lawn! Hard to believe but even if half true it just shows you. We might just be on to something here.
Slan
🙂 Mark

P.S.- password for www.thefakegrassman is “letmein”