For this week's installment of Friday Favorites the prompts are:
Favorite (or Dream) Job
Favorite vacation spot
Favorite Book
1) Favorite (or Dream) Job:
I don't have a dream job. If it was up to me I wouldn't work at all. How's that for honest?
Of the jobs I've had, I'd have to say that the last full-time job that I held before I had Bella was my favorite. I've been in retail my entire working life. When I was 18, I started working part-time at a store while I was in college full-time. I hated school more than I hated earning a paycheck so I "took some time off" and started working full-time. Fast forward to many years later, I never went back to school but made a career out of what started as a minimum wage earning, part-time job. Retail is tough. You work long, thankless hours. People treat you like shit and think that because you work in a store, you are dumb. Au contraire, mon cheri. I'll never knock a formal education and recognize that an education is never a waste of time or money. However, not having a degree doesn't make someone lazy or dumb. OBVIOUSLY. But I digress. In any event, at the "peak" of my career I worked for a woman's boutique style retailer as the store manager of a training store. When someone at a management level or above was hired, they came to my store and our team showed them how things were done. I was also on our company's expansion team which meant that whenever a new store was opening (anywhere in the country), I had to live in that area for a few weeks while it was being built to help coordinate the construction, the merchandising, etc as well as hire and train that store's staff. In addition, our company was based out of San Francisco so I would fly there twice a year to help develop new products. Not bad, huh? And when there was no one to train or nowhere to go, I still had to run my home store and 7 others. I was responsible for about $14 million worth of sales per year. It was a challenge, but yanno what? I loved it. Most of the time. It may sound dumb but working with customers could be so satisfying and being a rock star in your field isn't too bad either. Running a multi-million dollar business is something to be proud of, no?
2) Favorite vacation spot:
Spain and Portugal. My grandmother took me there when I was 12. I long for the day that I can go back!
3) Favorite book:
Confessions of a Shopaholic. I am profoundly vapid through and through...
My friend Shay works I guess what you would call high end retail in the furniture industry. She works for Nadeu Imports. She has a job much like you did. She just helped opened their NYC store. She's very VERY good at what she does. I think I'm one of those rare few that appreciate what people go through. Quite a few of my friends are in that field.
ReplyDeleteLove Confessions of a Shopaholic. That book made me LOL while on the bus reading it.
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