FATHER P. CLIP

Bringing hope, peace and unity to the good brethren of business supplies

The good Father on ponds full of filing cabinets and feeling hot, hot, hot!

I

don’t know about you, but we’ve been experiencing a bit of a heatwave in the village recently, something none of us are used to. Pens are drying up, letter trays are melting and the guys in the warehouse have been picking the goods without any clothes on, which is a health and safety nightmare. If some of the customers knew they would be appalled, but it’s cheaper than having to install air conditioning that would probably never be used again.

We’ve got a village pond that people are starting to jump into to cool down - this creates a slight problem for me because we’ve been dumping products in there for years. I know it’s not very environmentally friendly but I never thought that anyone would ever be jumping in, and its products that are either faulty or unsellable - things like filing cabinets that we told customers we couldn’t get keys for so that they would buy new ones, and empty ink cartridges, which no-one has ever found out how to dispose of properly.

Mrs O’ Reilly, who looks after our green, environmentally friendly, goods department, jumped in and jammed her toe into an old typewriter, which she then retrieved from the pond. She was absolutely devastated to find out that’s what I’ve been doing and, given her green credentials, she made me sign an agreement that it would stop happening as she chucked it back in.

We ran out of fans about a month ago and even though we have about 100 of them on back order we refuse to tell the customers that they will never arrive, hoping that, when they do get delivered in November, they’ll keep them for next year. We’ve used this tactic in the past and sometimes products don’t come into stock until the next year when they need ordering again; I can’t tell you how simple that makes things.

We know that by next week I’ll be putting on my winter cassock and waterproof sandals again so I don’t get too stressed about the heatwave. Everything changes in life and in the stationery world, quicker than you might think.