The Bear and the Bull

Friday's golden moment came when I, in a confused state, asked my boss to help me differentiate between the connotations exerted by the two animals in the title. He grabbed a bear puppet from his table and with huge round eyes, reminded me that the word "bear" exudes a negative outlook by saying, "Remember the bear!!!!", while orienteering it such that it looked like it was about to give me a fatal bear hug. Cuteness beyond measure!

To my surprise, the puppet was reversible. I realized that the puppet was in itself a banker's joke. If you happen to be well versed with financial world jargon,  you'd appreciate this adorable reversible puppet! I want one! 

The bear

The bull

My boss also happens to have a pink flamingo in his yard, which he said he stole from a dinner party and which rode with him on the tube back home. He's amazing. Period.

Oh, I did the coffee run today, with pleasure :D

Deep Green Eyes (Or was it Hazel?)

6.50am: Enters office only after someone else scans in. Interns never get full access to anything. I am an alien to the research desks. It reminds me of the time when I was interning last summer. However, I did get new hardware and internet access and email AND stationery on my very first day thanks to my awesome boss and a very very nice colleague.

7.00am: Boss comes in, smiling happily. He switches on the microphones, and I start taking notes. ABF striked me as really interesting. Although the retail industry in the UK is suffering now, I am of the opinion that whoever owns shares in ABF should hold them because it is a hugely diversified company. It owns both Primark and British Sugars besides some other bread and even pharmaceutical companies. In dire times, consumers will look to what is cheap. Boss pointed out to me that I should be aware of how Primark is hugely affected by rising cotton prices and due to such low pricing, will have to suffer from squeezed profit margins. How long will it last before prices are forced to rise? Good point indeed, but I am still strongly inclined towards holding shares in ABF. I compared the price graphs against M&S and Sainsburys and it seems that ABF is doing much better than those two. Also, other highlights were about Imperial Tobacco  announcing a rise in cigarettes prices, the overall USA stock market doing well and something about new transportation regulations in Italy.

9.00am: Boss has a meeting with the Mid Cap Sales team and I get to tag along! Everyone is abuzz about Russia's new drinking law which will apply to beer, hence Carlsberg. Forecasts of tornados in the USA may adversely affect insurance companies. I learned later from my very very nice colleague (VVNC from now onwards) that the Russians drink mostly vodka. Good discovery. I also learned later at home that the Russian government has only just classified beer as alcohol recently and that the death rate from alcoholism is really high in the nation. Alcoholism has been labelled as a 'national disaster' by Kremlin.

10.00am: Boss realizes that I'm still confused about the role of our team. He asks VVNC to explain it to me later and takes me on an exciting tour of the building, 3rd floor. Amazing facilities! Place for investors to meet up with companies via conferences and meetings, presentations and such. Relationship building!! Coolness. I'm liking my boss more and more every minute.

10.30am: Boss is stressed about meeting his deadlines before he flies off to SA this Friday for a holiday with wife and kids. I try to help him find reported AUM values for institutional investors in 2 countries, and stay a bit past lunch just to make sure I didn't screw up his presentation. VVNC goes out for his lunch break, which according to him, was at a pub, and which according to boss, is not a joke. HAHA!

1.00pm: I head off to lunch. I was dying for a honey roast and egg sandwich but for the sake of being different, decided to go for a mexican chilli chicken. Bad choice. The sandwich sucked big time. Oh well..

2.00pm: I reach the office again. Met another intern with no access into the room. I knocked and boss let me in. VVNC joins shortly after. He wants to give me a lesson on our team and our project. I jumped up and went and during that session, I think I started to crush on him. He was such an excellent teacher! He used so many analogies to make me understand the role of our team. At times, I just stared into his eyes and beamed. He was so perfect, in every way, that I was slightly frustrated at myself for not realizing how much more awesome he was than I first perceived ( mind you, the first impression I got off him was already amazing). I felt like a stupid schoolgirl crushing on her tall and handsome maths guru. *slaps self*. I even wanted to take a picture of the diagram we drew together in the lesson but I guess it would have been too embarassing if I made a trip back to my seat just to take my handphone to snap that valuable memory. What if he realized I took my handphone without rubbing off everything from the board? Argh.. Anyways, another colleague admitted she had a crush on him today while I was there, and his reaction was hillarious! Curious bordering on amusement, but no self-conceit. What!

4.00pm: I start photocopying for the first time for my project. Some other colleague didn't want me to keep hold of the material I needed for too long hence the usual pitiful intern by the photocopier scenario. But I enjoyed it to the max. Read some report on Burberry while I was at it. It's cool to see how SWOT and Porter's 5 Forces model was used at the end of those reports. I must have taken too long at the machine that VVNC hops over just to check on me. Does such a nice person really exist? I'm speechless, it's just utterly unbelievable.  

5.00pm: I head out with my team for a social. My boss knows so much about Malaysia and he's such an amazing, fantastic person with lots of views about this world. He's also very familial but knows when to administer freedom to his children. Purely amazing person! I also met another intern today, who is drop dead gorgeous and is quintessentially an English rose. I just can't believe how beautiful she is every time I see her.

7.30pm: I reach home, have dinner and commence with some readings. Then I decided to write this blog entry. Interesting day.  

Colours

Oh what a day it has been! I woke up at 4.30 am and rushed to my colleague's place at Great Portland Street to help her carry cupcakes to our enterprise venue, which we reached by taking the overground- a first for me, despite being a Londoner for three years already. We were greeted by an assortment of pastries for breakfast, none of which I took a particular liking to except the apple turnover. After a short team briefing, I was assigned the task of walking around the local area to garner in sales with a guy who worked on a presidential campaign in the past and another postgraduate who will be studying in Paris next year. What a happy trio we were, at least at the start! Task of the day for our team: Produce and sell lunch items to make the most profit for our charity!

Our sales team was really inefficient. We walked into schools and high rise banks only to get the receptionists smile at us and promise to paste up our menu on the announcement boards. It was all wrong to me. To me, it was glaringly obvious how wrong that strategy was. How can anyone pay attention to a piece of paper with a sticker logo of our charity and a handwritten contact number to pre-order lunch on the same day itself, due in a few hours time? Next, whenever we approached someone, two of my colleagues would suddenly launch their pitches at the same time, overburdening the listener with information. Also, one of them only mentioned the name of our employer (not a very smart thing to do as some people have horrible sentiments towards institutions of that sort) and only the lunch items, without any mention of our charity! I was quite surprised at his street skills. Then again, I did not have a better strategy but I was critical of his ways and tried to point out that what we were doing was completely and utterly useless. In the end, we had absolutely no results and just wasted our energy when we could have helped with the production line! It was my biggest regret of the day and I was very frustrated that my team was not able to see ourselves out from such a hopeless state of being. Perhaps our only consolation was in bumping into some BOA interns who were doing less interesting stuff. :P Just kidding..

When we got back to our venue at 10.15 am, I immediately volunteered my services to the production line. It was MUCH better use of resources. I never made so many sandwiches in my entire life! Our team made so many Ploughman's, Thai Sweet Chilli and Tuna sanwiches and baguettes along with fruit and tuna salad. Some of us went out into the streets to pull people in to buy our lunch menus. Others rushed around in Borris bikes, trying to get deliveries in at the right time. It was tension and excitement as the day's lunch period finally arrived. I have to say that our inventory management was swell! Towards the end, everyone launched themselves as salespersons, diving into stores and selling sandwiches cheaply. Some people were sympathetic! One guy asked me to take all his spare change on the counter for our charity. Another guy just handed 1 pound coins to me without wanting to buy anything. Another man just told me that he simply doesn't want to donate to charity. Another guy cheekily said he was fasting. Very interestingly, another person on the street just grabbed some sandwiches off our basket because he thought they were for free! These were the things we saw, our team of 4, one sweet Vietnamese lady, the political campaign guy, a hot Irish guy with a stern face but an amazing smile, and plain old me. Have I already mentioned how lucky I am to be inspired by all these people? Not one word of complaint from them the whole day. Not one ounce of reluctance from anyone when asked to perform any task (well, except from one other intern who didn't want to package anymore tuna baguettes because he was sick of doing it), which in my opinion, is rare as rare can be!

At 1.45pm, sales were to stop. Period. We came back to our venue, with minimal levels of stock! Pure joy! Our facilitator invited us to lunch, a spread of food which in my humble opinion looked far less amazing than the ones we ourselves prepared :P. He shared some golden moments with us. The time when everyone dashed around looking desperately for a can opener (I learned later that some of my team mates actually tore open the can of tuna with his bare hands). And the other was when another Irish team member danced his 'kicking victory dance' when he was dead knackered at the end of the day after pulling in customer after customer. Golden indeed! It was even more amazing when our profit figure of about GBP583 was announced  by the accounting team. The sense of achievement that settled in our hearts is just indescribable!

When we gather back at our training centre with the rest of the interns, the winners were announced at a profit of GBP719. Although we were vouching for the first place, we ended up second. Honestly, everyone in our team were dissapointed. But the joy was in the brevity of that. We gave ourselves a good pat on our backs. We were AMAZING! We were a TEAM and we LEARNED a lot from today!

Enough said.

The Apprentice

Day 4 of Training

This week has been a flurry of activities, a blur, a brush of colours on an empty canvas made swiftly by a paintbrush dipped in all seven semi circles of the rainbow. My coarse hands shook many different hands from all over the world, my little feet stepped into intimidating high rise buildings - I met so many inspiring young people who made me want to gasp in admiration at their caliber and maturity. This week has been a very humbling experience in a way that it has taught me just how little I know, how much more I can improve. I've taken a few minutes out from my incessant emailing of local businesses located around East London to raise funds for tomorrow. I know just how inefficient emails are but it is still worth a try. Our employer set a task for us interns to raise funds for a charity via selling of lunch items tomorrow, The Apprentice style- only difference is, no one gets fired. It's such an amazing opportunity to be in the middle of something like this, where everyone is so motivated to be the best. I've met so many AMAZING young people this week! I know, I know, I'm reiterating, but they really do inspire me. As part of the sales team, I'm one of the people in charge of roping in orders tomorrow, of which to be entirely honest, we didn't have much time to do. Training hours took a lot of valuable time away and we are really pressed for time but the outlook is positive! Two girls from my team have contacts in high-end offices around London and they've managed to get 25 orders in already for our charity.

As a parting note, one of the best things I've heard so far this week from one of our facilitators is: "You're allowed to wear jeans and sensible shoes on Friday". My feet are smiling now despite the obligation to wake up at 5.00am tomorrow to help my colleague carry beautifully decorated unwanted Hummingbird cupcakes to our venue first thing in the morning.

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Unfamiliarity

There has always been a part of me that never grew up. That part of me that is a little girl, has always remained timid, shy and dependent, forever afraid of change. Today, as I moved my belongings to my friend's flat, the weight amassed over three years of being a student here in the UK burdened me. There were very kind people who helped, of which I am very grateful, but the fact that I received help frightens me. I've always had help, be it from kind housemates, thoughtful friends or a caring boyfriend. What would I do when I'm by myself? I suddenly realized that I'm by myself. Out of the three categories of help I often receive, I'm now down to two, and even from those two, who really are my friends? Do friends really have the capacity to care sincerely for you? These thoughts depress me. I am really alone after all, with only God to cling on for real.

The flight of stairs I took today while shifting my stuff up to the topmost floor continued winding up in an everlasting spiral in my pessimistic imagination. My ankle was sprained today and it's starting to swell. A Legoland of boxes at my friend's flat caused me to feel slightly claustrophobic. The dirty microwave in their kitchen made me sad. The thought of shifting my belongings in September to my new flat by myself initiated a bubble of despair in my stomach. See how trivial these thoughts are but yet how negatively I'm affected by them?

I blame it all on the unfamiliarity of the situation, the new life I'll be living in the next 10 weeks. Hard work, little sleep, new people, daily tube or bus rides, independence. I'm just me now, not defined by anyone else. Just me. And although that's liberating, it scares me.

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Done

3.30pm yesterday marked the end of the third year of my undergraduate degree. The moment the invigilator commanded for everyone to cease writing and to put our pens down, a wave of liberation traversed throughout the entire examination hall. How many smiles were there I wonder? 120 smiles perhaps? Some with teeth, some with dimples, some cheeky, some excited. That's artificial optimism. I forget how it is also possible to feel indifferent, tired, plain swamped. 

Smiles everywhere, soon translated into unacceptable chatter. Bubbles of excitement surfaced, spread like wildfire. Beloved lecturer (who never once raised his voice to the class) yelled for some quiet. Peace restored, only to the ear. Jumpy buttocks on the seats. Heels bobbed up and down. Papers collected, counted, boxed away. Glances made between comrades. Impatient effort to keep still. Invigilators raised the green flag for leave. A scraping of chairs. A stampede for the bags. A hoard of happy faces out of the door. Out Out! Freedom awaits! Friends tickle each other. Hands shaken. Hugs exchanged.

"Congratulations!". "Happy holidays!" "How did you find the paper?". "It's finally over!"

For some, the end meant no more waking up at 4am in a frenzy to squeeze more information into their cramped brains. For others, it signaled an end to their hermit lives in the library. Proper food afterwards, no more takeaways. 8 hours of sleep or more, finally. A haircut perhaps? A shave right after? 

Wonderful it was, the great sense of achievement that comes after 2 months of mugging. All the stress and bitter frustration, washed away in a sea of excitement. Life is so much more, and it was regained again, a few moments after 3.30 pm yesterday.  

Near

My last paper is tomorrow. I'm another one down today and wasn't feeling like myself. I woke up slightly dreary and uninspired, eyes all saggy and swollen. I need to catch up on some beauty sleep, I'm getting old. How will I feel like tomorrow when it's all over and I have nothing urgent to fight for? I feel as if there is a finish line to cross tomorrow, but I'm not on a racing track, so my inertia can't even carry me further on into the fields, beyond the line. Rather, I meet a dead end to an alley. More on this  peculiarity later. It's back to work for now. 

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