20-10, ngày Phụ Nữ Việt Nam. Sao trong gần 20 năm qua, hầu như anh chẳng bao giờ nhớ đến ngày này. Trong đầu anh lúc nào cũng chỉ có 8-3 và…. 14-2 thôi. Giờ thì nó đã nằm trong cuốn lịch của anh, chen chúc giữa bao nhiêu điều cần nhớ khác. Một năm trước, em nhắc anh về ngày này và nhắc anh gửi lời chúc đến mẹ. Một năm trước, anh đã có một cô bạn thân bên cạnh, mang đến cho anh những lời khuyên thật nhẹ nhàng. Chẳng phải anh đã có một tình bạn ngọt ngào sao?
Ngày 20-10 năm nay đã đến gần, lần này đã được anh tự nhớ. Thoáng trong đầu anh nghĩ thầm, chẳng biết nên làm cái gì để tặng em; rồi anh lại làm những thứ này nọ gì đấy, để ý nghĩ kia lại thoáng vụt đi. Khi anh chưa kịp ngoảnh lại để nhớ thì 20-10 đã đến, và em đã lại xuất hiện, nhắc anh nên gửi lời chúc mừng đến mẹ. Ngỡ ngàng anh lại nghĩ, vẫn chưa có gì cho em cả. “Uhm, it s ok. You still love me. That s enough to me, honey.” – Em nói. Chẳng phải em là một cô gái ngọt ngào sao?
Sáng hôm nay anh lại tỉnh dậy, đón chào ngày 10-20 ở thế giới bên này của anh. Đến căn tin lấy đồ ăn trưa, nhìn thấy món Spaghetti mà lòng anh khẽ cười. Vừa ăn anh vừa nghĩ đến bao lần chúng mình đi ăn tối. “Mì Ý cà bò”, từ nay anh cũng sẽ gọi món ấy như thế. Anh nhìn cả ly sữa kế bên. Bữa nào anh cũng uống một ly sữa, nhưng hôm nay ly sữa ấy lại làm anh nhớ em. Nhớ khi em gọi anh “Con người đam mê sữa!” mà buồn cười. Đã bao giờ anh thích sữa bằng em đâu chứ? Thế mà hôm nay sao anh thích sữa vô cùng. Chẳng phải chúng mình đã có những kỉ niệm ngọt ngào sao?
“Khoảng cách nào là khoảng cách xa nhất?” Đó là khi hai người ngồi cạnh nhau trong một không gian vô tình. Chúng ta ở hai nửa bán cầu khác nhau, ngay cả ngày 20-10 cũng khác nhau. Thế mà sao anh vẫn có em trong từng ngày của cuộc sống, vẫn cảm nhận được sự hiện diện của em trong mỗi bước chân. Khoảng cách này thật gần, gần quá. Lòng anh cảm thấy thật ấm áp, dù bao nhiêu toan tính xung quanh vẫn lạnh ngắt như mùa đông đã gần kề. Chẳng phải cuộc sống này rất ngọt ngào sao?
12:09 PM. Ngày 20-10 của em đã hết và 10-20 của anh chỉ mới bắt đầu. Một làn gió thoảng qua anh thật nhẹ nhàng và êm dịu. Anh khẽ mỉm cười, nghĩ đến em giờ đang ngủ say và thầm nghĩ, chẳng phải tình yêu của chúng ta cũng quá ngọt ngào sao?
As the main goal of IBE is “to sell something”, we needed to know what we were gonna sell first. It could be anything, which made it just so excited for me to imagine about the product. As creative as I had always was, I should come up with something so unique, so appealing that there never was before, and everyone would love to buy it, and buy it a lot. Now I think back about it, my creativity wasn’t big enough to keep up with my day-dreaming ability, as things weren’t going as I thought at all – again.
The first idea I got was to make T-shirts, but make them “combo”: there would be three different designs of the three parts of a mule, that when three people wearing them stand together the mule would appear. What do you think? My teammates didn’t think the idea was good, so it was given up.
As days passed by, the people were having ideas of typical products such as clock and flag; I came up with another “weird” idea: a wrist-band with a plastic ring connected to it, like this
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This idea of mine shared the same fate with my previous one, and at this point I was truly sad. If innovative ideas were not gonna be considered, then we would sell normal products; and anyone could come up with that so I didn’t need to try imagining anymore. And so, there was no more new product idea came from me.
After some time they had a list of about 10 products, including clocks, flags, playing cards, pint glasses, stickers (wth?), T-shirts, (normal) wrist-bands, and some other things. We then tried to conduct a survey of customers’ opinion. Each person stood at a place on campus and asked people passing by which ones they would like to buy. It was the first time I actually did a survey so it was rather nice. I felt awkward with the first few people and then got used to it. However, I felt much more comfortable when I saw the people I already knew before. There was a huge and scary American dude with a scar on his forehead walking by when I came to him. When I was just starting, “Hello, I am from the IBE…” he said, “I am in a hurry,” then walked away. I felt like I was disturbing people like how those shampoo marketers used to disturb me back in Vietnam a long time ago. But that’s just how marketing worked; I needed to be more shameless about it. During a couple hours I had asked so many people that I couldn’t remember. Then on the next day, I came to a friend of mine and shoed him the survey. He said, “You asked me yesterday, it’s still ‘C’ and ‘E’.” I didn’t remember asking him, kinda embarrassed but that’s ok.
The results of the survey led us to the top five choices: wrist-band, T-shirt, playing card, pint glasses, and flag. Since there were five teams in the company, each would do some research about one product and then we could compare among them. Our team’s product was… wrist-band. Since I couldn’t get my unique wrist-band approved, I at least tried to make the typical wrist-band somehow unusual. And so the new idea appeared: wrist-bands that are glow in the dark! Yes, glow-in-the-dark, baby. I could see in my head how awesome glowing wrist-bands were. I could wear them in any dance party, and my hands would shine along my break-dance moves (Step up 2, that’s right). How did my idea turn out? Nowhere, as you may guess. I already knew what my role in the company was not: I was not going to be a decisive factor. Any thought that I had by days and nights thinking would not be acknowledged. Then why try?
Eventually the final product was the frosted pint glass. I didn’t even know what a “pint glass” was, too much for the notion of being “frosted”. However, when some company officer showed the pictures of the product, it didn’t look bad at all! Maybe their ideas were just better than mine, sure.
So the next step was to design the glass, which was more clearly stated as: which UCM logos would we put on the glass. I soon forgot my question of “why UCM logos but not something else”, and joined them to see which ones were good. I would love to have something small at the front and something bigger at the back (come on, it’s not even a new idea I just created, it’s a basic for many things!). I could care less for the small part, and I wanted the picture of the tower at the back. The FriendshipTower is our college’s symbol; you can see it on UCM flag, walls and other places. But my idea was once again refused. “The tower is ugly!” they said. So in the end, the product we were gonna sell was a frosted pint glass, with two UCM logos on each side, a product that I had absolutely no contribution. Oh my, how in the world I could sell something I didn’t have any passion about, I wondered.
The thing is my life had been worse than that, so I wasn’t totally disappointed. Somehow I managed to learn to love the glasses, and found for myself some confidence of selling them. As I understood myself a bit more, I wouldn’t hold such a dream like “being the best seller in IBE history”. I would simply do my best to sell as many as I should. Until then, I would at least achieve something and show it off with my girlfriend.
IBE stands for Integrative Business Experience, one of the most important programs for my management major. It’s a four-hour period in three days a week from 9am to 1pm and it’s not just long. It’s huge and it’s like nothing I have even got into before. For many reasons, it makes this semester (fall 2009) become the toughest semester for me until now. So I’ve decided to write about it, believing this will be an interesting story for me and for those who read it.
The confusion
My first feeling about this program was that it’s so strange, so new, and yet so confusing. From absolutely out of nowhere we students were told that we’d make a real business on the very first day of the class. “Doing real business” means setting up a real company, having loan presentation before the real bankers asking for money, and working with real vendors to be selling some real products. It was a bit too “real” for a student like me, who had been only listening to lectures, reading textbooks, and writing papers (if they weren’t real, then were they all fake?!) Moreover, all of the people around me seemed really excited and confident, leaving me to be the only one who didn’t know what’s going on. My biggest question at the time was, “Did I miss something?”
Soon after that we were set into 15 teams, and then the teams were grouped into three companies. My 11th group had six members and it’s still six until today. The group belonged to the company “West” (the other two were “Central” and “East”). “West” was the temporary name, and the real name was yet to be decided later, when we have decided the actual product to sell. Each company had a meeting for an hour after the class in separate rooms. And the first meeting was the peek of my confusion. There were 29 people in my company, and most of them didn’t seem any friendly or nice at all. What worse was the way they conducted the conversation didn’t appeal to me any bit, and I was totally discouraged to contribute any opinion (which was rare if you know me). Those days were hard, and I kept wondering if this was what I wanted to do; if I’d have to work with unfriendly people like that – for my whole life!
I then went to see my advisor, to tell about my worries. She said that I wasn’t expected to know any of these “real” stuffs before, and I would be taught all that. I also shared my thoughts with my mother and my girlfriend, which eased my confusion somewhat. But nothing had ended there, more like everything had just begun and the adventure ahead of me was still too big.
The first great failure – or was it?
One of the first things we had to do for the company was to have the hierarchy, which means to have people filled into positions, such as President, Vice President, etc. The method was: self-nomination and votes. Knowing myself and knowing the uneasy environment of the company, I nominated myself for the Marketing manager position. My opponent was Jeremiah. Who the heck is Jeremiah? I didn’t care, must be some random guy, I thought, having no idea how much insignificant myself also was.
So I put some effort preparing the speech I would give in the next meeting. Using what I had learned in my Business Communication class before, I thought of some arguments to protect me from my disadvantages (such as being non-American, etc.) I was pretty confident, because even though they may not like me much, I would beat my opponent since he shouldn’t have prepared anything beforehand like I did. My girlfriend would be so proud of me.
But all what I pictured in my head was not true at the very least. In the meeting, I realized that Jeremiah wasn’t “just a random guy”, but one of the most involved people during the discussions. But his toughness was yet to reveal later, as we got to wait for the President and other higher positions first. One candidate for the President was a girl that I thought to be too lame. The way she looked at people, how she only read from some paper when having her opinion about something, made her become a very inadequate person in my opinion. So I voted for the other person, a strong guy with a bright face and a responsible attitude. But then the lame girl got the seat, only because many people in the company knew her more than him! The same situation happened for other positions: whoever I thought to be more able didn’t get voted. Then it was my turn finally.
I went out of the room for Jeremiah to give his unexpectedly long speech. Besides being international student and all, I didn’t know any single person in the company; I clearly knew my chance wouldn’t be high. Any rational person would choose to give up doing such a hopeless thing. Unfortunately I wasn’t smart, so I thought that win or lose didn’t matter any more, but if I gave up, I’d regret it forever. I gave my speech anyway. It wasn’t a satisfying speech, but I am now always glad that I did it. We two candidates then were waiting outside for the others to discuss, which of course mainly about my opponent. It was quite a long time and when we got in, we were told the victor. Jeremiah became our Marketing manager, and even though already anticipated all of this, I was a bit surprised and sad that I lost. The candidates couldn’t know who vote for whom, but I wished I could know if there was any person did vote for me.
But now I am not sure if it was better off for me if I have won. Jeremiah later on appeared to be a much capable person for the position than me for various reasons that I may mention later. Sometimes love and determination still need some rationale. So I should just do my best always, and leave the rest to God. “But what am I gonna tell her now?” I wondered.
