Lets get down to business

Just want to take a second and say that it’s such a great beautiful cloudy Sunday morning. I enjoy cloudy cold weather more than a sunny days so I’m currently feeling inspired to write and I’m listening to John Meyer so this should be a good blog.

For my career I want to do something different than what I am going to focus on during this Ethnography. This is just one of the many steps I would like to take eventually which is to focus on a store managerial position for a big retail store such as Nordstrom, Bloomingdales or Macys. I want to start from 0 and gradually move up because I want to experience every position and know how they work in order for me to keep in mind how my decisions would impact those who will depend on me. I want my work to be outstanding. I don’t want to do an ok job. I want to influence and be asked for advice. I want to be able to say that I am successful. That’s why I want to start from 0 to understand everything.

For my career I want to be a merchandise marketer for high end brands. I am currently a brand representative for Calvin Klein at Macys so I believe I’m on the right path. My next step is to be a store manager. For this ethnography, I have plan to interview my store managers and try to figure out how they communicate with each other to keep a store running.

I would like to know what works for them and what doesn’t work for them. I want to know how they can predict the traffic of people coming back and how they communicate to be ready for that.

I would like to know what made them apply for this position and how much experience they had before deciding to manage a whole store.

As a brand representative they are still above me. I have managers above me so I would like to know what is it that they do when they are not around in the floor. Are they planning meetings? If they are, how often do they plan them? What do you talk about? How often are these meetings taking place?

I would like to learn many things because as a store it looks like we are pretty successful. We have been the #1 several times. To me this is a great sign of communication because without communication this couldn’t had been reached.

Like any other discourse community, I know this community has public goals. I would like to ask them if their goals are the same as associate goals have? To sale and bring customers back or do their public goals differ? It would be amazing learning about what is going on while they aren’t around associates. Along with learning their cost of affiliation. What are they losing in order to be where they are at? How does this affect them?

The more I write the more excited I get to start this ethnography. Really looking forward to this project.

Ok, re reading this, I just realized it’s not that great as I was hoping but it is something. It helped me brain storm my ethnography and that was the idea of the blog. Winning! :)

In the Real Wolrd

Experiencing new things are often scary. If we could, we would all stay in our comfort zones but if you want to move forward in life you must take risks. When taking those risks you come to a point where you have to find a different identity and act. Why act? you might be asking yourself. Well let me answer that for you.

When you enter a new job you are an actor. You come in portraying to be someone you are not, just like in Halloween. We create this fake character of ourselves where we fake to be comfortable in the current situations that we might be in at work.

It’s very hard to start a new job and show your true colors right away because you can come off too strong and everyone will start to hate you and no one wants that in their new job. You know what they say, first impressions matter. So you must act like the nice, quiet fake person you are when you are around new people.

Also, you need to be confident on what you do and say to not let your cover down. You must have authority like Elizabeth Wardle mentions in “Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces." In other word you must be secure of what you communicate because communication matters and can lead you to “command not just the attention but confidence, respect and trust of your audience.” Once you have gain their attention and trust with your authority you can little by little let go of your fake self and show who you really are but in the mean time you must stay in the down low.

I’m not looking forward to this when I graduate from SDSU and get my first real job. I like showing who I am but I know I can come off too strong with my brutal honesty and my dry humor. Maybe that’s why I only have like 3 friends.

I will not only have to change the way I carry myself but also the way I speak. My language will have to be more professional and educated. I have to be smart about my choice of words and the way I express them but yet have the authority to gain the trust and respect of those who will be my new coworkers. I’m going to have to try and fit until I make it.

Although I’m going to hate doing this, it is a process we all have to go through in life.

We have to keep in mind that this is all just temporally. It’s a part we play in life and it happens so often that we should be used to it and embrace it I believe. It becomes our daily life practice.

We do this when we communicate for the first time with strangers. For example, when we go out shopping we act defiantly with the associates as we would if we were talking to our friends. Same thing when we go to a restaurant, meet new friends or join a group like a community practice.

It’s just like we have been talking in class since day one. We must adapt ourselves to many different situations. You must act the way it is expected to act, speak the way it is expected to speak and behave the way it is expected. At the end of the day it will all be worth it because in doing so you will most likely achieve what you are perusing. You know what they say, fake it until you make it.

We are more than what you see

In my short life of 22 years I have never experience working as a waiter. I have only had one job and that is the job I first ever applied to and I got it. Never have I experienced other jobs. Although I have not worked as a waiter, I got myself into the mindset of a waiter as I was reading this article, and let me tell you, I got offended by the things mentioned in this reading.

I work in retail and everything that was mentioned in this article I have also experience while doing my own job. I have overheard people talk down on those who work customer service. That they feel superior to us for the fact that there is no degree required to work in either retail or waitressing.

Although there is no degree required to work for either job, there is a lot of knowledge and patient that one must have.

In the Article Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers by Tony Mirabelli, Economist Peter Drucker argues that “interactive service workers lack the necessity education to be knowledgeable workers.” And continues saying that interactive services lack the “problem identifying, problem solving, and other high level abilities to work in other occupations.”

Maybe this guy needs to go back to school and educate himself again before making such arguments. A person does not simply work as a waiter or waitress because they lack education but rather to survive. We live in the time where being knowledgeable is no longer good enough to find a job. This time they require more than brains to manage to get into a well “educated” career job. If you don’t know anyone in the industry you are trying to get into chances are that you most likely won’t make it in. So one has to keep looking in the meantime, try to survive in any possible way. That brings one down to customer service jobs.

90% of the time these jobs are hiring so it makes sense to have them as your back up plan. Everyone thinks you don’t need any special knowledge to work here but let me tell you, you do. And it requires more than “educational” skills to work in such jobs.

Working in a customer service kind of job require you to have a more open mind and be practical to any circumstances you encounter. For example, we meet with a lot of people on a daily basis and we experience moments with people like, gradations, birthdays, proposals, weddings to the saddest like losses. We are required to adapt to such occasions and be smart about how to work with each person you help.

You aren’t going to give someone that’s celebrating their birthday the same service someone that’s experiencing a loss. Your tone and approach to both occasions matter. We don’t involve “routine and repetitive tasks that require little education” like argued in the article. If our repetition was the same everyone would have the same boring scripted like experience but it is not that way. We are smart enough to know how to treat people. We bring them joy and comfort. We have to be skilled enough to approach a customer including those who are complicated customers.

We work as people’s friends, therapist, problem solvers and we do our job. We experience more than any 9-5 job does. They are the ones that actually have a repetitive job that requires them filing, reading and writing. Our jobs require more than what they ask for.

If you can’t be patient and survive a difficult customer, you end up breaking down. No one sees this until they are in our shoes. We have the education that grants us the power of solving customer problems while they un-educationally yell at us with their vulgar language blaming us for their bad days.

True, we work in jobs that don’t require education. We work in jobs that require MORE than an education. We work in a job that goes beyond serving the customer and we become their problem solvers, their friends, their loss companions and their diaries.