Sunday 2 November 2008

My first day at Lush.

I would have posted this up last night but I got home at 9.30 in agony.

I have a rather groovy job.
I got ready and left at 11 so I could get there with a little time to spare (the shopping centre is so huge that you need time to find things). Gotta love my job straight away just for how relaxed they are about what we can wear. I chucked on some black jeans, a black jumper, pink & blue shoes and rather bright and crazy jewellery then walked down to the tube station without having to worry about removing the colours once I got there.
Walked into the centre at abouuuuttt 20 past 11, so I just had a wander around for a bit and watched some fashion show going on in the middle of the ground floor. The skinny people bored me though, so I just ended up going to work and starting 20 minutes early. I had to wait in the back for a while because my manager, Dan, couldn't find me a pinny to wear and a big box of hand cream fell down onto one of my supervisors heads (still don't know his name, so he shall just be Mr Brand) so I stayed back to help him clear up and make sure he was alright. I asked but all I got was "Screw how I am...did my hair survive??"
After that madness, I was thrown straight onto the shop floor and into the path of many rampaging customers who just looked verrrryyy scared whenever I said hello or offered to help them find things. It was awful, I just had nothing to do for about half an hour and nor did a few other people I work with. I ended up standing around the massage bars and having a play with those. FINALLY, my cousin and her husband came in, so I ran over to them before any of my colleagues could nab them and showed them some stuff, did some demos, had a laugh...they bought a lot!!!
After that, loads of people came up to me for help. I mainly stayed around the massage bars so I could offer hand massages to people, although most do look horrified when you offer. Women more than men funnily enough. We have vanilla scented massage bars with purple and gold glitter inside which all the kids that came into the shop really loved. I ended up doing glittery hand massages for a family of 6 children then let them all have a go (they did it back to me and one decided it would look good on my nose...I let her...don't know why...). Their parents bought them one each though, so it was cool.
Finally had my break which was 45 minutes long and I spent roughly 30 minutes of that in a queue all for a bottle of water. I think I'm going to leave the centre next time I have a long-ish lunch break.
I got back just in time for a LOUD AND PROUD demo. Dan stood on a foot stall and yelled his lungs out "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS, GIRLS AND THE UNDECIDED, TODAY WE'RE GOING TO SHOW YOU SOME MAGIC!!!"
That was followed by him making everyone chant "growth, prosperity, vitality, energy" over and over and ovvveeerrr again (our Christmas products are based around old pagan spells and ingredients and the chant is part of a spell). On the last chant, he crumbled a gold star bubble bar into a jug and shouted "I SHALL MAKE BUBBLES FROM CRUMBS!" before pouring warm water from another jug into it. That got loads of people into the shop, simply because Dan is possibly the loudest shouter in the universe. All of us happy helpers had to clap and look amazed at it all which was just funny because the customers looked at us like we'd gone mad. Similarly, when I dropped a tray of bubble bars and the plate clattered on the floor, everyone I work with just cheered and laughed like we were in some kind of restaurant than in a shop where that stock costs a lot of money.
On the subject of restaurants, the joke "Oooo, is it edible?", for just about everything in the shop, lost it's funniness on abouttttt the 1000th time I heard it.
We also had a lot of people in asking if we sold candles. One guy asked and I said that we only sell cosmetics, so he pointed to our soaps and went "So that are those things then? Candles no?", I said they were soaps and he looked at me as if I was lying!!! He walked off to sniff them then came back to me going "They feel like wax..."
I gave up and let my supervisor, Dallas, deal with him.
Another guy came in thinking we were a sweet shop but decided to stay in and talk to me anyway, he asked for a shop tour and demos of our shaving creams then just stayed in and followed me around. He started to chat me up but then checked his watch, asked what days I work then left and said he'd be back for some shaving cream. Oh dear.
Just as we were closing, this lady and her daughter came in and wouldn't stop asking for samples. She asked for samples of soap, which I explained we don't do because everyone knows how soap works, she then asked for samples of bath bombs (how the hell can you sample a bath bomb?), samples of bubble bars (again...how?) to the point where she tried to raid our demo pot to get some, she nagged other people for samples of our face masks and creams (we do those but only for people who aren't purely after freebies) and tried to take a bottle of our £35 moisturiser and put it in her pocket, but another one of my managers caught her.

I stayed an extra hour to help clean up the shop, and pretty much spent that time dancing with a mop, taking the mick out of my manager who go his own back by throwing glitter on me and stacking re stacking bombs.

My parents picked me up in the car and that was the first time ALL DAY that I had actually sat down. I was on my feet for the whole day...hence the agony I mentioned at the start. I just ache a little bit more than usual today.

So that was work.
I enjoyed it even though it was painful and Westfield has stupid people around.

As for me in general. Well, I still have a bastard of a cold and will be making more lemsip after I've posted this. I also miss Ben like crazy. It's worse than usual for some reason and, funnily enough, he text me yesterday evening saying exactly the same thing so WE ARE seeing each other on Monday. If that gets fucked up again I will be pissed off.

2 comments:

Manda-Caroline said...

Awesome! I'm so pleased for you Seashell ^_^

I think I might be in love with your Mr Brand, flattened hair or nay

DeeVine said...

LOL. Wow, sounded like a really jam packed day. But also sounded fun.
x