Well, another week in the big apple has passed and it's sad to think that I only have one more left. This week at the internship was craziness. We were preparing all week for this huge meeting on Friday with all the sales reps. This week I felt like I actually had some responsibility and was doing some IMPORTANT tasks. They had me in charge of hunting down the salesmen samples for a few days....keeping in contact with different members of the production team and hassling them about our samples. I also got to help set up the showroom and update the buyplan, which was cool, and I could tell my help was appreciated, especially Thursday night when Alyssa and I stayed until 8:30 to help put together the salesmen books!
Wednesday my Aunt, Tina, flew into town. Tina works for CK Underwear and basically hooked me up with this internship. Wednesday night I went out with her and 2 of her coworkers to this little Mexican place uptown where the food was amazing and so were the margaritas!! I had a big frozen peach one to wash down my steak fajitas. (Yum!)
Thursday night was also filled with great food. It was Leslie and Kim's last night in NYC so the gang went to Little Italy and had dinner. We stuffed ourselves and downed 3 bottles of Pinot Grigio and basically had a fantastic time.
And Saturday night I went out to dinner with Tina and 7 of her coworkers to a place called "China Grill". It was Chinese food, but VERY Americanized. It was a "family" dining style, where basically you order 2 or 3 things that come in HUGE portions and everyone splits it, like a mini buffet at your table. This is good if you want to try new things but don't want to order a whole dish of it. It was SO GOOD, I didn't want the food to end!!
I worked a few days this week, but today I worked and it was AWFUL. A summary of events:
1. Fire alarm went off during my first set of tables. There was no fire at all, just faulty wiring. It went off for over 30 minutes staight. The NYFD came (yay!), but my tables left. (boo!)
2. In some odd way the fire alarm going off triggered the AC vents to close and they couldn't open them back up without the alarm going off. Until they fixed it we had NO AIR CONDITIONING. It took them almost 5 hours to fix it. This resulted in the kitchen getting to over 90 degrees and the dining room not far behind, with the servers literally dripping in sweat at the few tables who actually stayed.
3. Some how there was confusion and instead of working a swing shift and getting off at 6ish, I ended up working a double (which I was NOT happy about) and not leaving til after 9:30---that's a 12 hour shift.
4. And, after all of the above, I only made $96. All Day.
So now, I just got out of the shower, and I'm going to bed. Tomorrow has to be better. I'm working at CK during the day then I have dinner plans with Pam and her mom and daughter, and afterwards we are going to see
The Fantasticks. It should be fun and a good way to kick off my last week in NYC!
Long Update
Wow, it's been forever since I've updated.
Pretty much all the past few weeks have been is internship and work. This past week has been really crazy at the internship though. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were all the same. We are getting all the salesmen samples in for market which is the first week in August. So when they come in I'm in charge of unpacking them (they come individually wrapped in plastic bags--like they do to the stores), sorting them, hanging them, and keeping a running inventory of what we have and what we still need. Its an ongoing process and every time you get the pile almost done a new delivery arrives. There were other little random projects to fill the time and meetings as well, but my whole life this week has been samples.
Thusday I wasn't really supposed to work but it's been so hectic that I came in anyways because I knew they would need me-and I was right! As soon as I came in I got to know the joy of "placeholders". Basically whatever we weren't going to get in by the big assortment meetings in the samples we had to still have SOMETHING for them to look at. So I had to print out the sketch and spec page, and then color swatch it, and hang it where the garment would go. I had to do this for every style and every color that was missing. And of course while I was doing this more samples came in.
Friday was by far the craziest day. I got there and right away I had stuff to do. First Alyssa and I did more placeholders, and then tackled the samples that had arrived. Next we started on a project for the design team-making color swatch cards for the Fall 2007 line. Basically there is a page for each delivery with all the colors used listed-and we paste the actual fabric color swatch on the page. These cards they send to factories for them to match up the colors on the garments. This was a huge task because we ahd to cut all the swatches by hand, but it's not due until the 31st so we have some time to work on it.
After lunch was when things started getting a little hectic. Aubrey (the director of merchandising) has been in Hong Kong all week and she came back on Friday, so we had to get all the samples ready and inventoried and in order. We organized the samples by delivery, classification and style. We started getting more samples in while we were doing this! As we went along we found out we needed more placeholders, so we had to do that, too.
Finally Aubrey arrived and the mood of the office changed dramatically. Everyone seems less stressed and much happier when she is around-its definately nice to have her back.
When she arrived she brought four suitcases of "hand carried" samples from the Hong Kong factory. It didn't take us long to unpack, inventory, etc all of them. And Aubrey even brought each of us-even the interns-a little gift from Hong Kong! On the way out Aubrey told me that she had been in contact with the girls in the office all week and she heard that I was a huge help--and thanked me for all my hard work.
Also this week we had a new girl start in the office as part of the women's merchandising team. She sits next to me so I got to talk to her a bit. It turns out she used to be an intern at CKJ! She got hired right after graduation as part of the sales team and she just decided she wanted to do Merchandising. So I got to talk to her about the difference between the two which was awesome. Also, Alexis is only a couple years older than me so it was reassuring to know that someone so young could do so well already.
On the other hand, being a server is really starting to get on my nerves. I can't wait to have a 9-5 job that I enjoy. Recently I've been so impatient with my tables. It may just be waiting tables in New York, but whatever it is, I've found I've been putting up with my table's bullshit less and less since I've moved here. For example, last night I had a table where the girl asked for "extra" lemons in her tea, so I gave her three extra lemons. She then proceeded to interrupt me while I was taking her boyfriend's order to demand more lemons, in a not so nice way. So I snapped my order book shut, walked away from the table mid-order, and brought her back an entire glass of lemon wedges and slammed it down on the table in front of her.
There was also the full grown woman who insisted on ordering off the kids menu. So I served her cherry coke in a 6 ounce plastic kids cup, complete with zoo animal decorations.
I also had a table that wanted to talk rather than decide what tehy wanted to eat, and after going over to the table twice and them telling me to "come back in a few minutes", I let them set fifteen minutes after I knew they were ready to order.
I don't think I would have ever done these things in Virginia. Why is NYC so different? For one the managers don't care. In fact they applauded my behavior when I told them. We are in Times Square, who cares if that one table doesn't come back? We will always have business. In a way that makes me sad, I used to care so much about the guests but now they just annoy the hell out of me. I think also it might be that this internship is giving me a taste of what is next for me and I cannot wait for it, so it makes waiting tables seem so......boring and irritating.
Today I am at my parent's house visiting. My grandma is in town and I haven't seen her in several years, and of course I get to see my parents and sister. And Brian came over for the day, which was great but very short. I miss him so much already, and I just can't wait for these last two weeks to be over so that I can get back to Richmond and be with him and all my friends again.
Busy Busy Busy
Wow, it's been forever and a day since I've updated. I've been busy like you can't even believe.
I've been working 50+ hours at ESPN Zone trying to make my bills, and the money there is fantastic...throw in another 20 hours at CKJ and that makes not a lot of time for much else.
Last week, however, we discovered a bar on the west side that did $1 Margaritas for the ladies on Tuesday nights, and let's just say that we definately took advantage of that offer. Not only were the margaritas only a dollar, but they were strooooong and all us girls got quite drunk. It was good times of randomness.
This weekend was the best, I took a bus home to Richmond Sunday night and stayed through this morning. I got to see Brian which was so nice, I got to see Jess and all the wonderful things she's done with our apt (it's totally hoooooottt), and I got to eat at all my favorite places. I went home to visit because I was homesick but now I'm even more homesick....I love my internship but I'm really excited to go back to Richmond, be with my boyfriend and my new roommate.
This morning it's a terrential downpour in the city, I literally had to wade my way through knee deep water to get to the subway...yikes. I hope it lets up before later when I have to work. My jeans are wet up past my knees and I get to trudge out in it later to pick up a birthday cake for one of the girls in the office......funnnnn.
Ok, back to work.
It's Official
I'm now done with training and I'm officially a server at ESPN Zone. My first shift is Thursday and I cannot wait!
Training's a bitch
So the past few days I've been too busy/exhausted to update. I've been training since Friday at ESPN Zone and it sucks. Not in a bad way, but just because you're working and making money for someone else. The hours are long and all you get out of it is a free meal. But, tomorrow's my last day of training and the Thursday I will FINALLY be on my own. The place is crazy though! The menu is the same for lunch and dinner so the money is just as good at lunch as it is at dinner which is awesome.
And, being New York, there are celebrities galore. Today I saw Geoff Ogilvy, the guy who won the US Open yesterday. And, tomorrow they are closing early for a private party. Someone rented out the whole restaurant, and I've heard it's a bunch of hip hop starts, like P Diddy and Jay Z. We'll see. But apparently guys from the Yankees, Mets, Jets, and Giants come in all the time. But we aren't allowed to ask for autographs or pictures.......which sucks.
But the people there are uber cool. I love them all, and they seem to like me a lot. I've been told several times that I am "the shit" and got invited to hang out with them before the TOM PETTY concert they are going to tomorrow. Just the fact that they are going to see Tom Petty makes them cool in my book.
Well tomorrow is my last day so I need to go study!
Yesterday was really boring and slow. Kristen was out sick again so there wasn’t much for me to do, since all the projects I had been working on had been through her. I got to finish up the inputting the cost and markup into the buy plan first thing, then I ran some errands around the building for a bit.
The best part of the day was definitely lunch. I got invited out to lunch (on the company card) with Gail, the VP of Merchandising, Aubrey, the director of merchandising, and Kelly, who is one of the merchandising assistants. I got to listen to Gail talk about her upcoming trip to Italy, and I got to talk to Kelly about places to go in the city. Kelly and I really got along well, as she grew up in Virginia and graduated a few years ago from UVA. It also turned out that Kelly interned for Aubrey at Tommy Hilfiger. Learning this bit of information was extremely reassuring.
After lunch it was more sitting around. I got to work on the propositioning reports—typing in numbers of units we plan on buying and reformatting the whole thing so that it was uniform. After that there wasn’t much else for me to do so I went home early—about three o’clock.
Today I had training at ESPN Zone and it was boooooor-innnng. A lot of training videos. The boring kind. And what was reaaaaly annoying was the people from 2 different banks came to try to sell us checking accounts. So what now? I can't go to training without commercials?
Today was pretty slow at the office. I came in at 9:30 and sat around for about an hour before they passed me off to Denise Jones in production. There I helped her pull Men's Holiday 2006 Pre-Classifaction samples to send downstairs to get classified. I felt like I was on a scavenger hunt because the samples were in 5 different places on our floor. After that Aubrey gave me a copy of the men's fall 2007 merchandise plan to make copies of and staple together for a meeting. After I finished that it was time for lunch.
After lunch I got to sit in on a couple of meetings which was really cool. First was the men's fall 2007 merchandise plan meeting with the design team. Aubrey explained to me later that the plan provides an outline for the designers of the types of pieces we need. For example, for the first delivery of merchandise we need four new long sleeve woven shirts, two priced retail at $59.50 and two priced retail at $69.50. The designers take this plan and in about a month they will present to us a line for the season. This is cool because I am witnessing the season from the very beginning.
The next meeting was for the "clubs" line. CK Jeans develops a special line for the discount clubs such as Costco and Sams Club. These designs are usually simplified versions of the main line. We met with the girl in charge of it and discussed how we were going to simplify a cargo short and pant to get a lower base cost. Basically we are taking off the little details such as extra stitching and little extra pockets. We will have the samples by July 1st.
Next we met with Chris and looked over "bulk wash submits" from the factories. These are samples of the final dye/wash of the jeans before they get done to the entire batch or order. We compare these submits with the original sample to approve or reject it. Some of the submits were way off in color compared to the sample we had sent the factory, to the point that you were suprised that the factory even bothered to send it to us. That meeting was short, only about 15 minutes.
Next I got to work some in Excel, which I love doing because I know Excel really well and can finish work quickly in it. I worked with the buy plan again, this time I was adding in cost for production and total markup precent to wholesale. I did this for all the knits and tees, and tomorrow I will finish with the rest of the line.
I really enjoyed getting to sit in on all the meetings today. I'm starting to get a better idea of how the whole process works, and every day I am loving this job more.
