Understanding the rules of the game.....The Future CEO's the beginning.....
It was a very amusing day for me today. I always knew i was outgoing, smart and could manage well with minimum resources...but today i proved this to myself. The 10th day of orientation at SIMS and its already made me aware of my potentials! Our class had a Business excercise today where in we all made up a buddy pair and had to go out to Deccan area to find ourselves a job for the day and to earn minimum of Rs. 100 each without spending even a single penny till we got back to campus. It sounded really easy and fun but the challenges started the very moment we got out from the campus gates.
And the journey begins.....The first challenge was to get to Deccan which was 4 Km from the institute and that too by taking a lift.It totally brought out the dramatist within me back to life...I made the funniest faces right from the brightest smiling face to the most helpless face to convince passerbyes to let me hop on. Well i did manage one finally and that too from a very old man and i wasnt too sure if he could actually handle the bike with me on it too ;)... nevertheless i manged to reach deccan and now the next challenge awaited me....I was supposed to meet my buddy there who was totally new to Pune and we forgot to exchange cell numbers before leaving college and even though he left 10 mins before me from college..He was no where to be seen even after waiting for 15 mins!!! I had totally given up the hope to carry on but then ....I spotted him across the road....There he was totally god sent i must say....Oh!! what a relief..and then our odessey began.....
We went to all the possible restaraunts on FC road, to all the famous apparel stores etc..crosswords, bag shops, Bata showroom, Oakwood etc etc etc.. but no luck at all... Finally at 11:45 am we managed to get the job at Louis Philippe outlet on JM road.... awesome luck i must say...after sweating for 2 hours and facing rejections and loosing all hope we finally managed a job at this exclusive air conditioned show room and for a decent Rs. 200 each for 4 hours!!!
Once we got to know our task there, we both got straight to work....the work involved updating the inventory or more simply put, it was to check for the present stock in the showroom. So i got onto checking the stocks for the their collections under the names Luxury, Khakis, Highlights, Formal trousers (PV,TR,Regular) under pleated and non pleated categories. The whole process took me 4 hours and while i was doing the needful there was a senior CCA who was assisting me through out and that too very patiently. He answered all my queries and praised me for picking up things really well and fast. Apart from doing the task assigned i studied the show room interior in details and learnt the concept of Visual Merchandise, the placing of products, the sequence of arranging the clothes, the reason for varying prices between almost similar looking fabrics and the art of making the customer buy atleast one item more than what he was actually planning to buy.
lt was a great learning experience as i had never thought that so much of planning goes into even the placement of clothes in the retail outlet. It was fun, exciting and extremely interesting and ofcouse very tiring too..it kept us on our toes throughout the day!
We then took our leave from Louis Philippe at 4:30 pm and set off to report to Mr. Manohar Kamath (The facliltator for this exercise) at FTI swimming pool with the 400 bucks that we managed to earn. Both of us were really hungry by now but alas...even with that money in our pockets...we could not buy ourselves food...as it was against the rules! And of course there was yet another challenge of reaching the required meeting place again by taking lifts which was an art both of us had mastered by then.
It was pouring cats and dogs when we reached law college road and we were late already but someting kept us going and we did walk our way to the common meeting place and were so glad to see all our classmates there and all of us patting each others back for climbing the first stay to CEO ship!
In the it was all worth it. Though totally out of energy end of the day i felt like a winner. It was an adventurous day for me as i never in my wildest dreams had ever imagined that i would actually earn myself a living without spending a single penny! So definately today i m proud of myself and realised that this was just the beginning and now that i have full confidence in me and now that i know i can do better..... I am gonna undertake this odessey right away!!!
