My First 2 Weeks of Being an Employee

There was a post to promote our company on this blog but I just deleted it, because I thought this should be purely a personal blog, just about me, and what you find here can only represent my own personal opinion. I'm building a website for my company, it's not like that we don't have a place to post articles, so, that post is gone.

For a long time I thought having an official job is quite a distant thing to me, not only because I'm still at college, but also because of lacking confidence in social life.
My father has been nagging around for 5 years about me finding a job, every summer or winter break, every time go to a new place, he always tell me "try to apply for some jobs, go from office to office, shop to shop, to ask for an opportunity". I applied some jobs when I was in Germany, didn't turn out to get any of it (cleaning, painting, sorting goods etc), but I never really went out to see people, to talk to anyone face to face. I had fear. A lot of fear, a lot of thoughts, what if they don't need me, what if my German is so bad that they didn't understand me, what if I need to run around for documents, what if ... mostly it was because I wasn't confident in my language and communicating skills. I mean, I'm a people person, I get along with a lot of people, I have a lot of friends and I make friends at fast pace, it's just whenever thinking about confronting supervisor, colleagues and customers, I feel nervous all over me, from every single hair on top of my head to the bottom of my feet, I feel uncomfortable.
So I really thought I would never be ready for a job.
I had job as my father's assistant in filming and photographing industry, but it was nothing. I had jobs as private English and Chinese teacher but neither of these two languages made me enough money to say "I'm on my own now".

Opportunities sometimes come in strange ways.

A friend of mine met a young lady on street, she immediately thought that lady should be quite extraordinary judging on her young age and elegant dressing choices, so my friend went up straight to speak to that lady, turned out they became closest friends now, and this young lady introduced my friend to a hotel to work as receptionist and eventually through my friend's recommendation, I'm working for this young lady right now.

So here I am, landing a job in hotel and tourism industry.

It's been 17 days in this job.

At first I got the recommendation because I speak Chinese, English and German, which is important to their open-to-the-world business. First a few days I was just learning the online booking systems, handling emails and translating all the documents and copywriting into English, Chinese and German, plus some cleaning and furniture moving tasks. Soon enough I started to unveil my potential skills, stretch the range of my tasks and extend my touch on multiple aspects, there are ideas sparking all the time. First I helped them to set up social media account, twitter, tumblr, then later Youtube channel, mostly it's me behind them posting stuff when I'm home free. Then I also showed them my photographing and film producing skills, I'm responsible for a big part of photos and videos we post on social media and website. Recently I'm working on our website. One day I thought, since we are doing business in luxury hotel industry, it's impossible to convince people without a legit website of our own! I proposed that we need a website, then they discussed to find someone to build a web. That night I built one website on my own, using a online website creating platform that I heard from a podcast I love very much(shout out to all the sponsors in podcasts!). I created a demo and it looked elegant and beautiful, my boss was definitely impressed, so naturally making website's responsibility fall on my shoulder. One day I saw a logo of us on facebook, it's plain boring and ugly, turned out it's my boss hired a architect designed. I was amazed by the ugliness out of an architect's hands, so I drew a draft on my own with freshpaint on my newly bought Surface Pro 3, turned out it looked very natural and nice, I showed my boss and she immediately loved it and asked me to draw more. So you guessed it, we dumped that architect and started using my logo. Well you can't find the logo on our website but it's our youtube channel profile, because the style doesn't fit in the website, maybe we'll make some adjustment on the logo later someday. Another idea of mine, also got great support from my boss, is to shoot a series of videos to show tourists how to reach any significant places in Venice from other points, to build a virtual street path guide, so that we can brand ourselves along with these helpful videos. Our partner, another boss totally loved this idea and they are encouraging me to do it.
Right now I rarely have much face-to-face contact with our clients, I still handle a lot of emails because my English is the best in the company, and most customers are from all over the world, whose best choice of language is English in Venice. Anyway, I still lack the confidence when I had to deal with customers face to face, I just don't know how to behave around customers, especially that they are all "higher class", since they can afford our super expensive luxury resort. If they are just ordinary people like me it wouldn't be so much a problem, but now I'm feeling so not comfortable to be around them. (my boss on the contrary is super confident when confronting customer, once there was some conflicts with our customer, I couldn't do nothing but to let them dump their anger on my head, thought this was the end of either our business or my own career, but later my boss came and effortlessly took care of the situation and solved the problem. My admiration towards her skyrocketed since that day, that's exactly what we often say "blahblah like a boss")
Last my boss wants to send me to train as a tour guide, I'm not really sure about this. On the one hand, if I get a certificate it's a life long benefit, and being a tour guide makes you a lot of easy money in Venice, also it will further enhance my personal value in this company. But on the other hand I have absolutely no interest in tourism and sightseeing, I myself am famous for not caring about anything famous or historical whenever I come to a new city. So, being a tour guide is like trying to do something I absolutely don't care and have to do it well. 
I've already spared a full time translator and customer service guy, a visual designer, photographer (potentially) and film producer, social media marketing manager and a website builder for my company!
I think I'll try to do the tour guide thing, just for money, which I need badly, and to further stablise my roll in this place.

My father finally stopped nagging around, I don't even have much time to talk to him. I don't know if I could handle a full time job after my next semester begins, I actually prefer working to studying at university, what we got from the professors is all empty and hollow, here in this job I'm discovering my abilities like never did before.

Ok, now finished my blog, which I haven't had time to write for quite a while. I can make no more youtube videos, write no more long long poetry, go no more night parties as I used to do a lot, the pay has not even reached the average salary in Italy but it's okay considering we are start-up. It will be worth it, after all I never had a serious job before my 24, spending tons of money of my parents to study abroad, now it's time to pay the debt and finally to claim to the world that I'm on my own. My dream came true, you see, I don't even speak Italian.