The days leading up to today was busy busy busy, and I didn't really have very much time to come to terms with the fact that I have left my old company and am going to be part of a new one until recently.
I was prepared to hate my new job, I went in with this mentality that it won't work out and I probably won't last a week, I was even looking at job openings on Jobstreet about 2 weeks back to see if there were any boutique firms that were looking to hire new Interior Designers, that was how much I was expecting this job to work out, but surprisingly, I didn't hate my first day at work.
I wouldn't say I enjoyed the first day of work, but not hating it is a good start.
It's really hard to enjoy the first day of work because everything is just different. I didn't miss my old colleagues as much as I thought I would and I didn't really miss my old office as much as I thought I would, but the one thing I really miss today that really stood out against everything else was the confidence I carried whenever I was talking to a potential customer about their Interior Design needs.
It sucks whenever a new customer walked into the store today and due to my lack of confidence to serve them, I end up just avoiding eye contact with them. I didn't have any product knowledge, I knew nothing about the prices of the furniture in the Showroom, I knew nothing about the products in general, like the lead time it takes for those furniture to be shipped from their manufacturing country, and this feeling of helplessness just brought me back to when I first started working at ID4, just that huge blur of what is what. Having to deal with work messages related my ongoing renovation projects actually brought me some semblance of confidence because it just reminded me how far I had to climb to reach where I was in Interior Design and if I can get that far in the construction industry, this furniture industry will definitely not be an issue.
Everything was overwhelming, but it was also underwhelming at the same time.
Overwhelmed because everything is new, the environment, the scope of work, my colleagues, the freedom I had when I was working at ID4 whereby I can just go to the mall across the road to get candies and drinks from Fairprice when I am bored and want something sweet, the lunch and dinner hour that is pretty much a "own time own target" situation and lunch or dinner can last as long as 3 to 4 hours with my colleague because right after we eat, we can just talk for that long. We woud always joke amongst ourselves when we go for a late dinner...
"We go eat buy our food at 7pm, have dinner and then talk until we can close shop at 8.30pm."
... now that I am thinking about it, I am actually really starting to miss that chatting session I used to have with them.
And I am underwhelmed because I honestly felt the "downgrade" in terms of job scope and responsibilities today, which is great because that's what I wanted, a less stressful job, but at the same time, it also feels like such a waste of my experience as an Interior Designer, like all the knowledge I had accumulated over the past 4 years slowly just disappearing. It's a very conflicting feeling.
But to run through what happened in it's entirety today.
I reported to work at 9.20 am today, never a bad idea to show up a little earlier for work, and no one was there to open the doors, met my first new colleague at 9.30am when he also attempted to go into the store but couldn't because he didn't have the key. He was also new, joined the company only a few days earlier than me, generally a nice guy, but I don't feel like I can click with him very much, my first impression of him is that he is just a little too deadpan for my personal liking.
After that, another colleague arrives, much chirper and friendlier sounding, and she ended up being the one who gave me my orientation for my first day, after the person with the key came and finally opened the door, she set me up with my own laptop, then gave me a quick tour around the showroom, showed the different brands the company carries, but I know that she only knows the product on a surface level because she doesn't actually work at the store as a salesperson, she is actually an admin person who works in the main office, so her walkthrough was not very in depth.
She leaves me alone after that brief walkthrough, and I was a headless chicken for that few hours that she was gone, one senior colleague did help me out a little by sharing some commonly used documents with me, then I actually met another colleague who had actually interviewed me 2 years back when I tried to apply for the same position, and I even met the person who had scheduled my interview but hadn't bothered to reply to me when I asked about the follow up interview that was suppose to happen, and her reason was...
"We normally won't bother replying if the candidate isn't shortlisted."
... which is a really shitty thing to do, I would have been satisfied if she had just replied and told me the position had been filled, but instead, she left me hanging, but at least now I have a face to attach to that email.
I had another online Orientation Meeting to attend to at 2pm, so I headed to get lunch with the new colleague at around 12.45pm, and the food court food was honestly not cheap because it's Orchard Road, so I guess I can add cheap and affordable food to the list of things I miss about my old company, and the food was quite generic, like way too expensive for the standard it was offering, plus the Teh Peng was kinda gross as well.
Had that mediocre and overpriced lunch in the Showroom, and after that, I attended the Orientation Meeting, which was just an hour of the HR introducing me to their e-System, it was a really really dry session and I don't think I absorbed a lot of what was being shared with me.
After that meeting was over, the admin finally returned and she continued her own Orientation with me, which lasted for another hour, she then gave me a 30 minutes break and I went to settle my renovation projects stuff.
After that 30 minutes break, we did another walkthrough of the Showroom, and this time, she attempted to teach me how to check for the prices of the furniture, because they are customizable pieces, there is a pricelist at the front desk that we will need to refer to to get the proper pricing. There were certain furniture in the Showroom that didn't have any price-tags on it, so the admin taught me that I had to check the measurements of the sofa and then look for the sofa in the price list via that measurement to get their pricing.
I went to take my measuring tape, she borrowed hers from another colleague and we started taking the measurements. She measured almost everything wrongly, it was either the tape was not straight when she did the measurement, or she measured from the wrong point, but the kicker here is the measurements I took, which were much more accurate, didn't match the measurements in the pricelist, and despite remeasuring, the measurements just did not tally.
The actual sofa in the Showroom measured about 1.77m in length, on the price list however, the closest measurement to that was about 1.85m. The admin then expressed her disbelief at the discrepancy, but told me that that is the model and I should base the selling price off that model. For a sofa that cost $10,000, that 8cm difference is a very expensive difference, it is so weird how off the measurements actually were.
After that very questionable lesson on pricing, I was asked to go around the Showroom to look at the furniture pieces and try and understand how those prices came about by referring to the price list, but before I could do that, I ended up running into a customer who started asking me for the price of a dining table, I thought this was a great opportunity to take what I had learned a few minutes ago into practice, so I attempted to look for the price on the price list, had no idea which furniture it was because it really wasn't very clear, especially with the material description that they were using in the pricelist that I didn't really understand, I had no choice but to redirect him to my other colleague because I didn't want to end up severely underquoting him for the item.
As I was about to go do what I had originally planned to do, another customer comes up to me and ask me how much the sofa she was looking at cost, this time I got a senior colleague into the picture and he was really nice, he asked me to tag along with him while he explained the furniture piece to the customer, he even talked about the brand to the client, and then he actually gave the customer to me.
It was more of asking me to follow up with the customer, but I thought it was nice that he was actually willing to teach me about these things. I then went to him a few times later that day and asked him more things.
Work was suppose to end at 7pm today, but because I had to prepare the quotation for that customer by today, I ended up leaving at around 7.30pm, and I took that long because I really didn't know how to prepare the quotation correctly, and I had to use Google Sheet instead of Excel, which made things a little complicated for me.
I left after I send the quotation out, it was literally for 1 Sofa, which is nothing compared to the quotes I had to prepare as an Interior Designer, but that really took a while. Good news is I am off tomorrow so I can drop by my site to check up on the progress, but I have to work on both weekends this week for a warehouse sales, it's a little daunting, kinda remind me of the time I stared work at ID1 and was made to attend a roadshow event not even a week after I started, except that was so much worst because of the sheer amount of industry knowledge I was severely lacking back then.
We shall see how it goes after the weekend is over because I will be off again on Monday, which is nice. I like how the timetable is being scheduled, even though my off days are broken down into single days instead of 2 days straight like a regular office job, I will essentially only be working a maximum of 4 days straight at any given time before I get to enjoy my day off, these next 2 weeks, I will only be working a maximum of 3 days straight due to my weekends being burnt for the warehouse sales, but I do like the balanced nature of it.
This was the kind of timetable I tried to bring up to the HR at ID3 4 years back because she actually made me work 7 days before giving me my day off , and all she said was this was a very normal work schedule and that all my colleagues at that company works with a similar schedule as me, which was bullshit because I could see the timetable for everyone and none of them had to work 7 days straight. I shared this with the admin today when I saw her timetable and she told me that it was "inhumane" that the company made me go through that. When I think back to that, I am honestly glad I got fired.
Song of the Moment
Queendom - Red Velvet
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