Hello everyone,

The third week has already come to an end. Everything is going so fast, the working days, but unfortunately, the weekends are flying by as well.

I think my orientating period has come to an end now. The tasks I need to do are explained in detail and I now should be able to complete these tasks. So, first I will something about the period where I got introduced to the company and all the tasks.

First of all, the acquaintance. As I explained in the first blog, when I entered the building at my first day, it was a bit chaotic. Everyone was very busy with arranging things for the sample sale. When I entered, I told the person who I saw first, I was here for my internship and where I had to be. This person was very nice and she showed me the way to my supervisor. I introduced myself to her and then she gave me a small tour through all the departments and I introduced myself to every employee I saw. Everyone was very nice to me!

While arranging my internship, we made some agreements about my work times and things like that. They told me I had to work from 9 till 6. When I first contacted them, I sent them my CV. This way they knew what languages I was able to speak. In this e-mail, I'd also written down some information about the number of work hours are required (720 hours). We also made an agreement about at what date I started and ended. Another agreement we made, was about a dresscode. I have to wear nice and casual clothes. I am not allowed to wear jeans or sneakers.

I register my work hours in my notes on my laptop. I write down the beginning and end of my day, and then the total number of hours I worked that day, and week.

The other Dutch intern actually explained everything she needed to do everyday. My supervisor printed an intern manual. In this manual, all the detailed information about the different processes is written down. The first couple of times, the other intern registered everything in the computer and I was just watching how she did everything. After a while, I was able to do it all myself, but sometimes when I didn't know something, I could just ask the other intern and she would explain it again.

The evaluation of my orientating period was very positive. They told me several times, they thought I was a quick learner, because I was able to do it myself very quickly.

Moving on to the tasks of this week. This week was actually pretty much the same as last week. Everyday I am busy with processing all the orders. On Monday, we receive the most orders, because of the weekend. Last Monday, we had 130 orders to process and this is a lot compared to the usual, but because of the extended Black Friday offers, we had a lot of orders.

I am getting more responsibilities. For example, this week I had to process the returns on my own. This means, refunding the amount of money paid for an order to the right person. This process can be a bit difficult because it involves lot of different steps. First we need to make sure the payment is refunded to the customer, we have to print the invoice and put the refunded payment in the weekly sales so we can see how much money we made that week. We also have to put this item back in stock, to make sure the stock levels keep updated.

This week I also learned how to answer the phone. This is actually quite easy because most of the time they are looking for another employee, so then I just need to connect them with the right person, or take a message and forward this message.

On Friday night, I had a couple of drinks with some of the other employees. This was very nice, because this way you get to know them better and works gets more fun.

On Saturday night, I went to central London. I went to visit Carnaby Street, Covent Garden and Regent Street. This was very pretty, because of all the beautiful decoration.

I hope this blog was a bit more interesting than the last one :)

See you next week!

- Anouk