It’s the new millennia and you want to take a break from teaching and try your hand at a new job. Oh… by the way, the year is 1898 and you live in France.

Posted on the Arc de Triomphe you spot a work sign.

Wanted:

Assistant to Noel Bernard (The Famous French Botanist)

Experience necessary

Must be able to germinate

Seeds and manage a

Greenhouse

Sacre bleu! You tear down the sign and find his office to seek employment. You are qualified. Like all good elementary teachers you have been germinating mung bean seeds in a cup for years and years in a classroom, how hard would a few plants be? They don’t scream, joust with baguettes and best of all don’t go crazy on rainy days.

Mr. Bernard likes your confidence and hires you on the spot. He offers you 4 times your normal French public school teaching salary…if you are as good as you say.

“ze firsts job I ave for you is to germinate ze seeds of dis orchid. Ah, ze orchid…we ave figured out how to pollinate ze seeds of ze orchid, but we cannot get zem to grow. I av tried various methods including placing zem in soil, bark, even on coarse calico over a ball of moss. A bean…anyone can germinate. Just look at all that material the young embryo can draw upon. But the orchid…it has nothing. But of course you know this. If we could just figure out what the orchid needs to grow and provide it during germination we would be in luck. I do ave a letter from one of my orchid hunters who claims ze orchid has a fungus in ze wild. I don’t care how you do it. Just get zem to germinate. Ze seed are in ze old greenhouse. And get that greenhouse prepared as I am having a shipment of Blue Flowered Vanda orchids arriving next month. Now go.”

THE BOTANISTS ASSISTANT

Part 2

In a daze you walk to the greenhouse. There are your seeds. Actually they are more like dust and nothing like those huge mung seeds.

Then you look about the abandoned greenhouse. Broken glass, worn pipes, an old fan, a box system that is either a heater or a cooler or a watering system or something.

While cleaning up that old greenhouse you stumble onto a time machine tat will take you exactly 100 years into the future. You have the opportunity to spend 4 days in the future to figure out how to keep your job.

“The Botanist’s Assistant” Chris Mihm USC CSP Leadership Cohort – Summer 1998, Los Angeles