The new woman joining the hospital’s records department was being shown the ropes.
The morning was taken up with the department’s manager explaining the clerical duties for the records clerk. During their lunch break, the manager suggested that she gave the new staff member a tour of the grounds. After a long walk they found a bench and the two women sat down to eat what they had brought out with them. The new woman gazed out across the expanse of lawns and gardens.
“Nice grounds,” she remarked.
“Yes. The new gardener is very good.” After a short pause, the manager said, “The last one was a bit of a grump and to be honest, a lousy gardener.”
The woman was surprised. “Really?”
“Yeh. He was with us for over thirty years, can you believe that? Hardly did a thing. Every time brown patches began to show up on the lawns they had to talk him in to doing some watering. Which amounted to him bothering to turn the reticulation on. He was hopeless.”
She stopped to bite into a sandwich.
“He hardly ever did any weeding,” she continued, “and the flowerbeds looked awful. As far as I know, in all the years I’ve been here, he never did any pruning or hedge trimming. The new guy has been busy trimming them all. They look nice, don’t they?”
“They do.”
The manager looked around.
“When he passed away, he left a very generous donation in his will, well over a million I’m told. He requested that a memorial for him be placed in the grounds.”
“Oh! I don’t remember seeing that.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” She dropped her voice. “That’s it over there.” She nodded back over her shoulder.
The other woman peered around.
“It’s the compost bin in the corner. If you look closely you’ll see his initials scratched on the lid.”