i'm back from my 3 day refuge in Jurong!
sanity has been restored, i was totally not writing with a straight mind in the last post.
today was spent recovering from pseudo jet lag. the time zone of normal pple and the juggleress just doesn't match. so after 3 days of waking at 8am i'm totally disoriented. thot i could keep up with the momentum today but in the end just kept dozing off, even after i showered to wake myself up....amazing.
the 3 day refuge was nice, the only downer i could think of was the physical exertion. the long ride there, the long hours, standing and talking to customers for stretches of time....every night i just got home and collapsed into deep sleep.
but besides that everything else was pretty fun. Somehow it just happened that the number of helpers at our counter was inversely proportional to the crowd at our counter. So on Fri there were just 2 of us dealing with super long queues and non stop action. On Sun there were 5 of us stoning and chatting at the table cos there was virtually no one at our booth.
after this stint, i guess i can understand why in general some service staff are anal, cos it's quite tough. not that it makes it acceptable.
----------------------------
we had our fair share of pushy (to put it mildly) customers, but nothing too serious, cos Creative was pretty flexible and gave us freedom to appease them. (that's one thing i've learnt and appreciate abt Creative, they are really very customer oriented. so if you're unsatisfied abt anything they'll do what they can to help)
somehow pple associated all of us in uniform as One. So some customers will come up to us innocent ones and go "you said this one is so and so ...." when it's really the cashier who told them stuff. Or sometimes i would serve someone and he's not satisfied with the policy and he would come back and argue with my colleague. "just now you said....."
There was one customer whom i misread her receipt and directed her to my colleague for a free gift which she wasn't entitled to. when my colleague told her she's not eligible, she gave him a GLARE. haha..oops. (he found the glare funny too). good thing there was no queue at that time. otherwise i sure get killed.
then there was the counter-to-counter misdirection.
"sorry sir we dun deal with membership. the counter over there deals with this."
"that counter told me to come to this counter."
"errr......down here only got mouse lei."
and we overheard the perm staff of the information counter complaining that the temp staff keeps directing everyone to the information counter. haha. she wasn't talking abt us though, she was talking abt the product temp staff. but we looked guilty anyway.
there was one customer i served whom was a staff from Creative (he was wearing a staff tag). Although he almost met the criteria for the free gift, he didn't meet it fully and i explained that i couldn't bend the rules. He was alright with it. Later during the staff briefing i found out that he's quite a tua pai staff...like some regional manager or sth. like woah. Lin ting thinks that that's Mr Sim's brother cos they look alike but then we realised that everyone in the management looks alike and he managed to peek at the tag and it wasn't "Sim".
there's a little kid whom i gave a mentos sweet too and i had him hooked to me (or rather, the tube of mentos on the table). started playing peekaboo with him using the boxes of mouse as the wall. the Mr Sim-lookalike aka high level manager came by again the next day and helped himself to the mentos sweet. Putting a bowl of sweets on the table might be a gd idea. or maybe we could put out a buffet spread as free gifts. "Hi sir here's your mouse and 2 fish balls." then the temp staff can spend all their time counting fish balls.
there was also a mystery surrounding a highly seducive bottle of mineral water. Someone (we haven't figured out who) put a bottle of water next to the computer keyboard where customers use for registration. One of the customers joked with us abt whether he could take the bottle cos he was thirsty. we said no and after friendly banter he walked off. The very next customer, this teenage girl, sat down, registered, then calmly took the water bottle away and started drinking with relish. We still dunno whose bottle it was ("mine is marked" "mine is behind the computer" "mine..er..i didn't drink anything.") and why it's so attractive.
--------------------------
Being in our counter was fun too cos there was a confusion over who was in charge of us and in the end no one was in charge of us. so at the end of the day we were like headless chickens wandering ard looking for pple to sign our time sheet. Not that we were neglected badly. From time to time some staff members would come to check on us to see how we were doing and remind us to go eat. (speaking of food...it was always time to eat! one hr after lunch, it was time for tea break. then after that it was dinner... and they have funky beverages like luo han guo tea.)
Mr sim was there on sat and sun, walking around, checking things out, listening to the post event briefing. we were tempted to use the mouse like lego blocks and build a "Hi Mr Sim!" sign but decided against it. (we thought maybe that would show how creative we were and he would hire the whole lot of us. wisdom prevailed.)
a foreign customer was highly excited that he saw Mr Sim in person. "maybe it's the equivalent of us seeing Bill Gates", my colleague suggested. we were also tempted to get mr sim to autograph our shirts/mouse (and then auction it off) or better still sign our time sheets. again wisdom prevailed.
even the walking to the train station after the last day of sale was no less of an adventure. there were 4 of us and the guys decided to lead us to the short cut- a path under the mrt tracks cutting thru a huge deserted field. it was a fairly long walk too, in the dark deserted area..walking on the sandy tracks carved out of the grass field by others who took the route.
quite freaky in a way.
and so marks the end of the 3 day refuge.
sanity has been restored, i was totally not writing with a straight mind in the last post.
today was spent recovering from pseudo jet lag. the time zone of normal pple and the juggleress just doesn't match. so after 3 days of waking at 8am i'm totally disoriented. thot i could keep up with the momentum today but in the end just kept dozing off, even after i showered to wake myself up....amazing.
the 3 day refuge was nice, the only downer i could think of was the physical exertion. the long ride there, the long hours, standing and talking to customers for stretches of time....every night i just got home and collapsed into deep sleep.
but besides that everything else was pretty fun. Somehow it just happened that the number of helpers at our counter was inversely proportional to the crowd at our counter. So on Fri there were just 2 of us dealing with super long queues and non stop action. On Sun there were 5 of us stoning and chatting at the table cos there was virtually no one at our booth.
after this stint, i guess i can understand why in general some service staff are anal, cos it's quite tough. not that it makes it acceptable.
----------------------------
we had our fair share of pushy (to put it mildly) customers, but nothing too serious, cos Creative was pretty flexible and gave us freedom to appease them. (that's one thing i've learnt and appreciate abt Creative, they are really very customer oriented. so if you're unsatisfied abt anything they'll do what they can to help)
somehow pple associated all of us in uniform as One. So some customers will come up to us innocent ones and go "you said this one is so and so ...." when it's really the cashier who told them stuff. Or sometimes i would serve someone and he's not satisfied with the policy and he would come back and argue with my colleague. "just now you said....."
There was one customer whom i misread her receipt and directed her to my colleague for a free gift which she wasn't entitled to. when my colleague told her she's not eligible, she gave him a GLARE. haha..oops. (he found the glare funny too). good thing there was no queue at that time. otherwise i sure get killed.
then there was the counter-to-counter misdirection.
"sorry sir we dun deal with membership. the counter over there deals with this."
"that counter told me to come to this counter."
"errr......down here only got mouse lei."
and we overheard the perm staff of the information counter complaining that the temp staff keeps directing everyone to the information counter. haha. she wasn't talking abt us though, she was talking abt the product temp staff. but we looked guilty anyway.
there was one customer i served whom was a staff from Creative (he was wearing a staff tag). Although he almost met the criteria for the free gift, he didn't meet it fully and i explained that i couldn't bend the rules. He was alright with it. Later during the staff briefing i found out that he's quite a tua pai staff...like some regional manager or sth. like woah. Lin ting thinks that that's Mr Sim's brother cos they look alike but then we realised that everyone in the management looks alike and he managed to peek at the tag and it wasn't "Sim".
there's a little kid whom i gave a mentos sweet too and i had him hooked to me (or rather, the tube of mentos on the table). started playing peekaboo with him using the boxes of mouse as the wall. the Mr Sim-lookalike aka high level manager came by again the next day and helped himself to the mentos sweet. Putting a bowl of sweets on the table might be a gd idea. or maybe we could put out a buffet spread as free gifts. "Hi sir here's your mouse and 2 fish balls." then the temp staff can spend all their time counting fish balls.
there was also a mystery surrounding a highly seducive bottle of mineral water. Someone (we haven't figured out who) put a bottle of water next to the computer keyboard where customers use for registration. One of the customers joked with us abt whether he could take the bottle cos he was thirsty. we said no and after friendly banter he walked off. The very next customer, this teenage girl, sat down, registered, then calmly took the water bottle away and started drinking with relish. We still dunno whose bottle it was ("mine is marked" "mine is behind the computer" "mine..er..i didn't drink anything.") and why it's so attractive.
--------------------------
Being in our counter was fun too cos there was a confusion over who was in charge of us and in the end no one was in charge of us. so at the end of the day we were like headless chickens wandering ard looking for pple to sign our time sheet. Not that we were neglected badly. From time to time some staff members would come to check on us to see how we were doing and remind us to go eat. (speaking of food...it was always time to eat! one hr after lunch, it was time for tea break. then after that it was dinner... and they have funky beverages like luo han guo tea.)
Mr sim was there on sat and sun, walking around, checking things out, listening to the post event briefing. we were tempted to use the mouse like lego blocks and build a "Hi Mr Sim!" sign but decided against it. (we thought maybe that would show how creative we were and he would hire the whole lot of us. wisdom prevailed.)
a foreign customer was highly excited that he saw Mr Sim in person. "maybe it's the equivalent of us seeing Bill Gates", my colleague suggested. we were also tempted to get mr sim to autograph our shirts/mouse (and then auction it off) or better still sign our time sheets. again wisdom prevailed.
even the walking to the train station after the last day of sale was no less of an adventure. there were 4 of us and the guys decided to lead us to the short cut- a path under the mrt tracks cutting thru a huge deserted field. it was a fairly long walk too, in the dark deserted area..walking on the sandy tracks carved out of the grass field by others who took the route.
quite freaky in a way.
and so marks the end of the 3 day refuge.
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