my first real job

This is a long overdue post, I know. I've been caught up in... stuff la. And was kinda lazy to update but here goes :)

As some of you know, I'm working! And for once, I've stayed with a job for more than ONE WHOLE month now. I'm a telemarketer at Teledirect Telecommerce Sdn Bhd. What do I do? Basically I sell insurance over the phone.

I was really excited when I completed a week of training and finally got to be on call for the first day. Finally I've got a real job, where people (at least some) take me seriously. No more sitting around, staring blankly at a screen trying to recall how many copies of the delivery order my heavily pregnant, pre-maternity leave senior asked me to make, and which colour of each copy should be put into which file. No more admin crap for me! This is the real thing, I thought.

Everything went smoothly at first. It's like what Paul Coelho described in 'the Alchemist' as Beginners Luck: "when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. (p23)"

The first customer I presented to declined at first and said in Cantonese ‘Ngo fok zho lei la’, commented that I really know how to talk, and it ended up in a double-sale! My first day on call and I had just 12 sales, one sale short of ‘star’ status. The first customer I presented to in Chinese ended up in a sale. And the first customer I presented in Malay too ended up in a sale. Everything was going right.

After Beginners Luck wore out, things went downhill.

I had 4 sales on the 2nd day and 3 sales on the 3rd day. But then it shot up to 11 again on Friday and then it fluctuates again. For the first 2 cycles in the first month, overall I did poorly, just a little below ‘Green Zone’. Then suddenly for the last cycle I started to consistently have 20+ sales a day, and for that cycle I shot up to ‘Super Star’ status. I still don’t know what I did differently for that cycle, (maybe it was God, maybe it was breakfast with Aaron who brought luck, maybe the stars aligned in my favour, maybe because I didn’t wear black), I don’t know why, but things happened the way it did.

And so at the end of that first month, I got my first real pay slip. (My mom made me treat the family to lunch at Dragon-i the day after). I took a picture of it but couldn’t load it on. I also had commission that’s not bad at all for a noob.

Oh and they rank us all by our sales every month, and the top 25 in the whole company gets a bonus. This rank initially gave me a lot of pressure cos I started off at the very, very bottom, at 300+. But at the end of the month I shot up to 27th,!! Just 2 places and 3 sales short of the top 25 bonus grrr. Never know when I’ll get a superstar cycle again…. Stupid streak of luck gone to waste L

Anyway, to those of you who endured my talk of number of sales to this point, bravo! Here’s where it gets a little more interesting la. (At least as interesting as this job can get)

As most of you know, I get bored easily.

The job’s excitement is wearing out slowly. I used to love people and now after meeting lots of people over the phone…. Shrugs….. I still love people, but much less. The reality of my job sinks in and I don’t believe in what I sell. So now I’m back, hovering on an average of 12-16 sales a day, counting down the hours before work ends. And thanks to a reminder from Lex, I count down they days left in my contract too. Haha.

But the thing that I like about my job is the people.

Everyone else is young, I haven’t met anyone whose age is above 25 yet. We play silly games once/ twice a day before we go on call. And we do silly cheers with our campaigns like orientation groups do in school. We have silly challenges where we play make-believe Pirates, where our campaign challenges another campaign in our sales numbers with “Gold Coins” (chocolate of course) at stake. When someone closes a sale sometimes people cheer and everyone else tries to clap. Our teamleader splits our campaign into pairs and punishes the 2 pairs with the least number of sales by letting the rest put silly make up on their faces. The most memorable of all would be the ‘Celebrity’ non-sales challenge whereby we dress up as some celebrity we look like. Our teamleader got our whole campaign to dress up. Or rather, she dressed us all up and shipped us away to the judges. Haha. Nearly all of us got into the top 30 where we had a 2 minute walk on the red carpet. Guess what I went as? Haha, I went as Baby Spice, Emma. The 2 minutes on the red carpet was embarrassing. :S But it was really really fun to see everyone else. There was a huge guy who went as Arnold Swachzeneger and boy do they look alike.

Everyone is nice and very very welcoming. They make a big fuss about newcomers at the beginning, that’s always the case, but I guess that’s why no one really feels left out, I think. Still, I don’t have a real clique of friends there though. And for times when I can’t get someone to eat lunch with I go alone, with my book as my companion.

Ah well, guess I’ll blog more bout these very interesting people at work next time. But this is all the blogging I can take for now. :)