THE ORIGINAL WEEK

DAY 1

For the purposes of keeping the lives of the people in my story private, I am changing all names and locations.
AHHH! I'm not panicking at all. I just got back from my first day at Grazia magazine, and I'm just about ready to fall asleep. But before I do, I must document this experience. As I walked into the main reception, my heart was beating out of my chest. By the time I reached the man on desk I was a quivering mess (very out of character), and my legs were shaking like shakira's booty. "I'm here to see Louise, is she in?" "Umm, I'm not sure she works here" - are you serious? It's my first day and you're not sure if the woman I've been emailing even works here? After adding to my worry, he then explains I need to go to the first floor to the other reception desk. On my way up, I see many workers, all unbelievably casual. I'm standing here in smart grey trousers and a black blouse, sticking out like a sore thumb. Great. Two minutes later and I'm greeted by the amazing Louise. Tall, blonde and gorgeous, I'm finding myself unbelievably jealous of the woman. Not only is she beautiful, she's lovely too! I only have positive things to say. After a little chat with her, she introduced me to my boss for the week - Helen. Helen's a petite, gorgeous, almost reserved character, but she welcomed me with open arms and sorted me out with work and a desk. 

Stuffing magazines into envelopes is not as glamourous as it sounds… until you start sending magazines to the likes of Pamela Anderson and Ollie Locke. Probably the highlight of my day.
My first job was sorting out the post. Every day at 10.30am the post is delivered in two massive bags. I was given a floor plan and told to deliver the post to their various locations. As simple as it sounds, the floor plan was harder to figure out than expected, and took a lot longer than it probably should have. This was the real world of work - no one spoon feeds you here baby.
Another job I did on my first day was the weekly write up. This was pretty exciting as I got to read the week's Grazia before any of the public could! It involves reading the magazine and inputing data about each page onto a spreadsheet. For example, the page number, title and a few key words.
All in all, I felt ridiculously out of place but had an amazing experience. Ugly Betty take 2 or what? Tomorrow's a new day and lets make this one count. 

DAY 2

Well, unfortunately after my second day (and all the days after that) I was absolutely shattered and therefore unable to blog. So, over the next few days hopefully I'll be able to recall everything that happened.

So my first job when I got there was the most important one I was probably set the whole time I was at Grazia. I had to read the magazine, pick 6 key stories which I thought were interesting and important, and write a little snippet explaining a bit about them and encouraging readers to go out and buy the magazine. Although I could've easily got carried away with myself, I kept it within the word limit and thoroughly enjoyed this task! Here's a screenshot of what I wrote...
After that, being as tired as I was from the commute, I decided to take my lunch and start something else when I got back. After wandering the streets aimlessly for an hour I went on a hunt for more work to do. Helen got me in touch with a member of the "Online" team, who work on all the posts for Grazia Daily. After a few emails back and forth with her she had given me a fun writing task to do - probably my main inspiration for starting this blog. I had to go through all the pictures on one of their posts and write captions for each of the pictures. Getting all cocky and ahead of myself as I normally do, I started on the task. 64 pictures!! 64 captions!! Storming through them, I started to feel nervous that they weren't going to be up to scratch. This is Grazia I was writing for here. By 6pm (home time) I was still no where near done. Get me to the train!

DAY 3

Tired isn't even gonna cut it. 6am starts and 9pm finishes (including commuting) is beginning to hurt. My body feels fine for most of the morning, but by lunchtime I'm about ready to keel over.I'm loving this. Finally starting to become the confident person I know I really am - not the quivering wreck that started here 2 days ago. It's amazing what 2 days in a place can change! I've finally worked out the floor plan and can now deliver post expertly, if I do say so myself. You'd think something that seems so simple would actually be simple, but alas, life's a b***. Anyway, now that I had that under control I was feeling a lot better about the whole situation. Finishing the captions was tedious. The article was based around celebrity hair transformations - cuts, colours, extensions, you name it they had it. But to my surprise, the most popular celeb cut of the year is the "lob" (the long bob). I've been spending years desperately trying to grow out my hair and now the trend is to cut your flowing locks off - typical. So anyway, I finished the captions today. Basically took me the whole day but I like a challenge. DAY 4 Well today was on the more boring side of the days I have had during this week. Whilst conversation and things are never dull here, there wasn't a lot of work for me to do today. I don't half love this job but today was rather depressing. This is gonna be a really short post as I don't have that much to say about today! Started the morning as I did any other - giving out the post (there wasn't even that much to hand out today) and then emailed around for some more work. Not one person got back to me all morning (it's understandable, they're very busy people). After filing a load of magazines and making tea, I didn't have anything else to do so I started sticking the labels onto next weeks envelopes so that they would be ready for shipment - not the most interesting but as long as I was helpful that's all I care about! Plus, I did get to listen to some pretty interesting conversations about my colleagues celebrity dates and crushes which was pretty fun.