I’ve been tired of flipping burgers for a while, and at some point I even was wondering if I would ever get paid to do something else then chain building junk food before obtaining higher education. After talking to a couple of friends and getting their encouragements to move on to somethig else, I made a man of myself and applied a second time at my local Futureshop, a Best Buy owned banner operating in most of Canada.

Now I know that here, BB and it’s affiliates aren’t really the most trusted vendors around here, and that pretty much everybody who posts here and knows his stuff has a story involving a BestBuy employee and his pet Fail-whale. Heck, before working at Futureshop, I had a couple of deviate opinions myself. But now that I work there, I talk with the technicians and realize that for that the staff over at that place really knows their stuff. Sure, some of the seasonal employees like myself have less knowledge of some areas, but overall, I was impressed of how much my colleges knew: every shift, I learn something new. 

The knowledgeable team, combined with my working environment which is basically a huge Toys R Us for grownups, makes it the closest I’ve seen to my dream job. There’s something about sales, salespeople will understand me, this little feeling you get when you know that you’ve taught your customer something relatively to what he was looking for, it makes me happy to a point where it’s pretty hard to describe. I’ll take the last two days for example: I’ve been selling quite a bit of routers and networking gear, and explaining wireles B/G/N inter-compatibility and gigabit ethernet to a customer who had stepped into the store with the simple intent of “buying a router” then hearing the said customer recall all the norms previously explained to him/her really gets me going. 

I never considered myself a good teacher, but for stuff I like, I seems like it just to come out naturally. I still have to work on the more technical side of my sales-speak and some product knowledge (like on printers, ), but otherwise, this job is my nirvana. 

There are just so many advantages compared to my old job, it’s incredible. There are no break scheduals as there used to be when a burger-flipper: the way it works is that if you feel you deserve a break, for a cigarette if you’re a smoker, you just got our there and puff off your craving. Because all the employees are commission payed, you’re the worst if you abuse this freedom: you’ll be closing less sales, and eventually your manager will holla back. On those slow Wednesday nights, you can feel free to have fun with the demos until you can help someone, because after all, it can only improve your products knowledge right? 

The staff is young and dynamic, and the ambiance really kicks arse. Bottom line, I’m happy with my new job. If you’re looking for your first tech-related jobs, Futureshop is something I’d definitely recommend. I honestly thought I wouldn’t be chosen because of my age: I’m sixteen and still in high school while the median age in the staff is about early 20s, but it turns out that they exert no discrimination about age, at least not at my local store. As long as you know your stuff, why not