As some of you may know I used to work in a tea shop.
When I started working in Five o’clock I had no knowledge about tea. All those tea-like things you can buy in a supermarket don’t deserve being called “tea”, though I did not know about that when I applied for work ;).
It was my very first work ever. In that time I was really shy, but I thought that working as a shop assistant will help me. It did. And here’s the point where good sides of this work end ;D. Now all of you will think I’m such a miserable nagger. For my self-defense I’ll add that I love my new job <3, but we will get back to this later on, shall we?
Back on the subject: let’s make it something like pros and cons of working for Five o’clock.
CONS:
The worse part was my boss. The Boss. The type of guy who would use iPhone not because he needed its options, but because it was expensive here and in that time you couldn’t really buy it in a shop. The type of guy who would travel to China just to take new photos for a broshure and most likely would use the money which had been purposed for his workers merit bonuses, a guy who would not see anything good you did, but will do everything to point your mistakes out and finally someone who dedicated himself to his shops and has no life beside them.
Seems like a great guy, no?
Second thing? The Boss’ closest co-workers. You just wouldn’t believe what kind of a mess they had in their office. Example? Once in a while we had stock-taking. After every and each we had to pay a lot of money, because there were things missing. After a while we started making our own lists of things we got and sold, with amounts and dates. Of course our papers and office’s papers were way different. Fortunately, most of the time we were able to prove that e.g. we didn’t get something or we sent something back because it was broken.
I also liked the camera time. We had a camera in the store, but it wasn’t placed there for security, because the only thing you saw in it was the shop assistant. It was kind of a leash, a way to check how good or, most likely, bad we are.
Ok, enough of this. I’d really be able to write an entire entry on cons only, but let’s just move to pros, because yes! There were some!
PROS:
Money. From my perspective. I know that the Boss was able to pay us more, but still it might have been worse.
Number two: tea became one of my passions and even though I don’t work there anymore I still can’t live without visiting a tea shop every now and then. I was able to try over a hundred of different kinds of tea. Was it worth it? Probably not, but the next thing was ;D.
You know, the domain isn’t named Vihainen/wrathful just because. After some time I wasn’t that shy and afraid of the Boss anymore. I started being quite rebellious, if I didn’t like something I wouldn’t do it. What I mean here is mostly connected with the way the porcelain and other small things were displayed. Like I said before, we were the ones who paid if something was missing so I thought we had a law to put things as we pleased.
In the end the Boss was quite scared of me. When I appeared in the shop he was off even if he’d spent past few hours giving orders to other girls. I remember a situation when there were only the two of us in the shop. I was standing by our Mac, doing nothing and the Boss actually used a check-out. For the first time in his life, probably, and I didn’t even say anything. I just looked at him ;D. Why am I telling this? It doesn’t seem really interesting, does it? Well, few days ealier he had been in a shop with other girl. She went to the toilet and when she got back there were quite few people in a shop and a queue to the check-out. He waited for her return instead of operating the device XD. How lame is that? XD
So that’s pretty much it. I’ll probably add something in the future since I may not remember everything now.
As you can see I added a whole category called Five o’clock. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on adding similar entries anytime soon. I was thinking about writing some Tea-orinted entries. A little bit of theory on where it comes from, how shall we prepare it, differences between each kind and later the most interesting part: reviews ;). Is Darjeeling really so delicious? Is matcha the only kind of Japanese tea? You will find out soon, hopefully :).
[Side note:] I wanted to add this post later, next week probably, but WordPress deleted my draft of the review I mentioned in my first entry x_x. It also deleted a comment I wrote on the same day…
Anyway, I’ll try to get the review done by next week, but my exams are starting this week so I can’t promise anything.
The Response:
Write a comment:
Megori on January 12, 2009 said:
I think WordPress is going in a rampage to make sure none of our posts really work or something. xD It never saved a whole huge chunk of one of my previous entries too. ~_~ Darn you WordPress! *shakes fist*
But that place sounds interesting. Lol. It kind of reminds me of when I worked for Walmart. However, Walmart is a ginormous retail store selling just about everything, so perhaps the setting was a bit different. However, the store owner was similar to the boss you described. The turd used the potential money that was supposed to be our bonus on his own interests instead (because we missed his goal for us by like, 0.5-2% or so). It was definitely infuriating.
However, I made tons of friends in that place, including a lot of managers. Money is always a very good side of it as well. LOL.
Wish you all the best in your new job!!