My first three months of 2012 was mostly spent on the selling floor of Adidas SP 1Borneo. I remember my first day of work, the awful smell of awkwardness on the selling floor. Working as a product advisor may sound petty but it is hard work. My first thoughts of what I was going to do was just wait for the customers to make their choice and bring in their sizes and prevent anything from getting stolen. And was it far off from what I endured. There is so much to the perfect customer service, and since Adidas is not some other brands, we have to carry the name of the brand and present it to others in a manner that won't tarnish the brand.. Sounds like exaggeration, yes, I thought so too at the very beginning. I guess you won't know until you experience it yourself.
Little by little I learned my way through everything that I need to know; the basic 8 steps of customer service, the ever so thick SOP (or known as Kitab Grace One/Grace One's Bible among us), even the smallest things such as the proper ways of folding clothes, steaming it etc. I was also the cashier so I learned some cash management and how to handle payments using credit cards. Doing the closing at the end of the day at first was hard for me, my money count is always different from the system and lets just say everything, every little thing was harder than I thought it'd be. Due to my love to the Korean culture, I was always excited whenever Korean tourists came in. Taufiq's always getting me to say something to them, haha! Well, I did have some decent understandable conversations with some Korean customers. All those addiction towards k-dramas weren't useless after all.
My colleagues were friendly so I was very thankful. They were very different than I was. We were all around the same age but most of them never got to pursue school. They are not well off so they only went to elementary school and because of that some of them had this misconception of who I was being that I finished high school and is planning on pursuing it and the fact that my family was financially stable. This is a little episode that totally made me realise this whole situation; Icha was eating bakso from some warung and asked her to bring me to there. She seemed completely thrown aback, thinking that I'd never go to these places. Well she's got a point, I was always eating Mcd or KFC or something very fancy every rest time (that's only because I didn't know the existence of these warungs). In short, they thought of me as this high class rich girl shit. Which is so the opposite of me!
This was almost a month after I left. After they got their pay of April they gathered everybody from 1Borneo and Inanam's branch and hold a farewell party for me, Sai and Iffa. We felt the warmth and was surprised because my manager admitted to never holding it to other employees that left before. I think I missed out the part where the three of us also Maroline from Inanam's branch, were very much loved by our managers. This was the third outing Grace One 1B ever had, and the first was initiated by us on January at JP, teaching them how to shisha (heheh). The second one was a friendly futsal match with Inanam branch. Yep, you can say me and my friends' nature that love hanging out influenced them to start having more company outings in the future.
I could go on and write pages about my journey here, every weird customer's story that came in, how we were always dreadful when Mandy would come in on us, how we dread morning briefing, how we thought it's the end of the world when sales were low, how angry we felt when someone cut our sale and the list is just endless. I would just like to express my biggest gratitude to everyone there especially my SP friends, to Miss Amy who never stopped believing and made us felt loved, thank you for the wonderful experience.
I don't think I'll ever forget our slogan for every morning briefing; One Malaysia, One Grace One, we are the best!
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