| Tuesday |
| the open experience |
As a program seller, my position required me to stand and yell for 4.5 hours every shift with a mere 15 min break in between, just enough to queue up for relieving the bladder then return back to my stand and work. Daunting it may sound, but fortunately with my intelligence and highly trained bumming abilities, that only applied for my first shift, there after, i quickly learnt ways to escape work whilst appearing to be working. Let me explain.
Selling program is potentially a dreadful task when you don't know the tricks of the trade, as i put it. It's not all laughs and fun when you spend almost 5 hours standing on a red stand with a program book held up high in the air, while you scream out, "Official programs for $15, players profiles, feature articles, honour's roles, food discounts, everything you need to know, here for $15!" Then 30 seconds later, you yell out the same content in a different order.
Often tennis fans either
1. Grease you off as if you are an idiot
2. completely ignore you even when you go up to them and greet them personally
3. subtly formulate a semicircle around your stand away from your ear-piercing attempts at selling, or worse,
4. stare at you for a little while then laugh in your face
After a few hours, you quickly learn that selling programs is about tactics and the amount of books you sell that day is certainly not proportional to how much effort you put into yelling. And then you pick up the idea that there are ways to make a daunting day fun:
1. When fans grease you off, you laugh in their face.
2. To the fans who deliberately and rudely ignore you, you laugh in their face, or chase after them and annoy them even more until you get a response, good or bad.
3. When yelling into the crowd gets boring, yell at your selling buddy and start a fight - simliar to the "penis" game where you try to out-yell one another.
4.Those who embrass you by laughing in your face, you laugh louder and stronger at them until their laughter cease.
5. When sales go down, yell out, "They're going like hot cakes, this is your only chance to get one now. Only $15!" even when it is blindly obvious how many unopened boxes are piled up behind you.
6. Cease yelling and working to chat when supervisors disappear around the corner. Keep an eye out for when they return.
7. Make conversations with supervisors. Smile and nod at them even when the conversation goes in one ear and out the other, and try hard to laugh at their attempts to be funny.
8. Instead of wasting 10 minutes queuing up in the bathroom, pay a visit to your bar friends and score free pizza and coffee during your break, return to your stand and eat and drink in front of buddied up supervisors, then ask for a toilet break later that shift - trust me, they won't refuse if you act desperate enough.
9. Amuse yourself by craving into cardboard boxes with stanley knives.
10. Drink lots of water in front of the supervisors and act tired at the end of your shift, pretending that you have worked oh so hard, even if you have the energy to line up 2 hours at the garnier line as soon as you sign out.
Following my own ten commandments, the 10 shifts i worked at the Aus Open actually turned out really well, despite the sweltering heat and chilling cold weather conditions. At the same time i worked at the aus open, i managed to juggle my usual reception job at the clinic simultaneously. I'd jump from one job to the other, some days working a total of 14 hours, waking to the early morning sun and returning home well after sunset. But entangled in all the mess and physical exhaustion, i have come to realise the significance of the existence of coffee in this busy little world of mine. I literally thrived on hot caffeinated drinks even when purchasing one and waiting in line meant i'd arrive late to work.
The two weeks came to a perfect ending when i found out that i was one of the top 12 sellers, scoring a movie ticket pass and further possibly job opportunities along with the almost $400 worth of clothing, which come to prove my mastery in subtle and useful bludging techniques. |
posted by sciurine @ 3:49 PM   |
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| ABOUT |
Thoughts, ...flowing slowly and gracefully, ...awakening the senses, ...keeping you up in the night, I sometimes wonder why people write. To express? To reflect? To be heard? I write, to free myself from a world of thoughts.
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