I’ll just say first of all that I won’t find out if I have the job until Saturday. 

But everything went okay I think. 

If you have any interest…

First of all I went in feeling nervous because there are FOUR Thorntons in Newcastle city centre alone, so after about 20 minutes Hovering in Next and pretending to be interested in shoes I didn’t like, I got over myself and asked if this was the right store, because if it wasn’t, I’d have some running to do. 

It was, but I was ten minutes early so she told me to come back because the manager was still ‘preparing’, whatever that meant, so I went and sat on a bench in Eldon Square, which is the local shopping centre and twiddled my thumbs for a bit when two guys in tiger-striped onsies walked by which made me chuckle. 

I went back in bang on 3 and I went in the back room with the manager who was like, take your coat off, put this apron on and go stand out front with this tray of chocolate. FUCK. I wasn’t prepared for it at all and I honestly thought, why bother? I’ll fuck this up and I’ll just go home now. It wasn’t too bad though. She told me what they were called and to offer them samples and smile and say these are ‘blah blah blahs’ and they are from this selection and they’re on offer so you should by them. The first people that came in, I was just getting myself together and I offered them the chocolates and smiled and told them what flavours they were and stopped at that, which wasn’t great. Then the manager disappeared round the back and I could tell she was watching me through the door which didn’t help, but I sucked it up and went for it and offered this guy some chocolates with a smile and then he took another, which was fine, I told him all about the special offer but he politely ignored me and asked if we had anything for his mum’s 40th birthday. Well, I didn’t fucking know did I? So I went bright red and told him to ask ‘that lady over there’ because I wasn’t introduced to anyone who worked in the shop so I didn’t know names, and then his friend came up to me and asked if she could pay on her card here and I didn’t know, so again told her to go ask someone else. She laughed and said ‘wow, what an easy job you have, can I have it?’ which  made me want to punch her in the face. After that, no one came in so I was pretty safe and she took me in the back fro the interview. 

She sat there with my CV and things were highlighted and crossed out etc, so she obviously knew what she was looking for and knew that I didn’t have any retail experience and she still called me for an interview so I wasn’t worried about that. She asked me a bunch of questions, all of which I answered reasonably well, and because I had no retail experience, she asked me to make connections with my nursery experience, which I did, REALLY well and then asked what I thought good customer service was and what I’d do if someone came in asking for refunds etc, and I think I gave good answers. She seemed impressed and said she had a few other people to interview today and tomorrow but she had 4 vacancies to fill and that she’s going to call me tomorrow or Saturday. 

If there’s any reason I don’t get this job it’s because 5 other people with 353459375 years of experience interviewed. 

I’m sort of semi confident about this. 

So yeah, for once, my anxiety sat the fuck down and shut the fuck up and for 10 whole minutes I was practically me again. 

I hope this might help other people with anxiety/panic problems. I have it pretty bad and honestly, to say I did this today all by myself was a near miracle. 

Oh, and thank you to all the people that wished me luck. I really appreciated it. <3