JOSHUA SEEMU­N­GAL

With each pass­ing day, more and more events, in­clud­ing wed­dings, are be­ing post­poned or can­celled, as a re­sult of COVID-19, ac­cord­ing to event and wed­ding con­sul­tant, Tri­cia Ng-A-Mann.

“Like night and day....it’s an ab­solute switch on, switch off. But­ton switch­ing off. That has hap­pened as a re­sult of the virus...every­thing has come to a grind­ing halt,” she says.

Be­fore the virus, Ng-A-Mann worked, al­most non-stop, for ten years, plan­ning hun­dreds of events.

Now, she’s be­ing forced to take a rest, of sorts, from her rou­tine.

In fact, the en­tire in­dus­try is.

“It would be a re­al­ly in­ter­est­ing ex­er­cise to see if I were to put pen-to-pa­per and draw you what the event cy­cle looks like. I think peo­ple would be sur­prised to see how many of us are in­ter­con­nect­ed through this in­dus­try, with­out even know­ing,” she says.

The in­dus­try is a web of close­ly-in­ter­linked re­la­tion­ships and ser­vices, based on trust.

As a con­sul­tant, she over­sees events, li­ais­ing with oth­er ven­dors, and ser­vice providers, each play­ing their part in bring­ing it all to­geth­er.

That po­si­tion pro­vides her with a unique per­spec­tive.

While she’s do­ing her best to main­tain a pos­i­tive mind­set, she ac­knowl­edges that ser­vice providers, and their many em­ploy­ees, are fac­ing un­prece­dent­ed chal­lenges.

Stress­ing the im­por­tance of re­main­ing pos­i­tive, she con­firms that some peo­ple, in the in­dus­try, are out of work for the time be­ing.

With dozens of emp­ty vas­es on the shelves, an em­ploy­ee of 137 Flow­ers, on Tra­garete Road, pre­pares one dozen ros­es for a wait­ing cus­tomer.

One by one, he care­ful­ly trims and cuts the leaves, bring­ing out the vivid­ness of the red and or­ange of the petals.

It’s the on­ly bit of colour in an oth­er­wise gloomy sit­u­a­tion.

Those flow­ers, as of mid­day, are the on­ly flow­ers he pre­pares for the day.

“Wed­dings have been post­poned. We had a few func­tions, but those have been post­poned as well. So, we just have to man­age the sit­u­a­tion,” ac­cord­ing to the store man­ag­er, Nicholas Prov­i­dence.

Up un­til late Jan­u­ary, things were busy, he says, but then COVID-19 came around.

The un­cer­tain­ty sur­round­ing the pan­dem­ic is mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for him to fore­cast where the small busi­ness will be in the com­ing months, and what steps will have to be tak­en to put it back on track.

How­ev­er, he’s al­ready mak­ing some tough de­ci­sions.

“We’ve had to cut our staff by 50 per cent. And, al­so of the 50 per cent who are here now, we have to ro­tate them dur­ing the week be­cause of how slow busi­ness is,” Prov­i­dence laments.

For the em­ploy­ees, at home, wait­ing for this sit­u­a­tion to pass, they can do lit­tle else but hope that it re­mains tem­po­rary.