Not-So-Moral Victory

    I achieved one of those moral victories this weekend wherein I think I lost more by winning it. That’s not purposely ambiguous for the sake of attempting to sound profound, I just can’t think of another way to describe what happened Friday. Bear with me for a minute…

    I think in every post I’ve written, I acknowledge, to some degree, that all I do is bitch and moan and persistently see the glass half empty and I try to justify that by claiming this is some kind of therapy. Friday though, oh man…it doesn’t matter how big of a baby you think I am, you have to have some respect from where I’m coming from on this one regardless if you’ve never served a single drink in your life. Let me draw it out for you…

    First off, I’m hung over. Like Freshman Year hung over. Oh top of that, have you ever woken up in the morning, and start looking around in a semi-still-kinda-drunk haze, slowly realizing you’re not in your house but for some reason get the ‘this room seems oddly familiar’ kind of feeling only to roll over and see your ex-kinda-girlfriend/friend-with-benefits-which-you-ended-a-year-ago-because-she’s-fucking-bonkers laying next to you? Well, that was how Friday started. Somehow, it only went down from there.

    First table I get, 12 soulless, sorority, trust-fund babies. From an untrained eye, this would be an amazing thing; pretty girls with lots of daddy’s money. However, girls such as this have not gotten to become such horrible human beings without feeling like everyone around them is below them (ie ME) and they’re entitled to, well, everything. I know what I’m dealing with going in, so I strap up and prepare for battle because I know it’s going to be a hard one.

    I kid you not, as I’m IN the process of placing the FIRST round of drinks down, Prada McFaketits is already complaining she needs a refill on her water and verbalizes her anger about it. It only got worst from there. I honestly cannot even go into meticulous detail because it genuinely makes me too irate to recall the entire incident, but I’ll leave you with this one specific. The blondest one of the group literally, yes *LITERALLY* started crying when her French fries were touching her prime rib sandwich because she asked for them on a separate plate. I wish I was creative enough to make this shit up, but I’m not. It’s obvious this is one of those tables which are fishing. They’re fishing for something to be wrong or to complain about so they can get *something*. The short and the end is they talked to three different managers a total of seven times, complaining about anything physically possible, and ultimately getting an entire $379 bill comp’ed.

    One of my staff members was outside smoking a cigarette as the pack leaves and witnesses the entire lot of them laughing and high fiving one another as they stroll bye, deducing the whole charade was an act to get an entire free meal. Like I said I can’t make this stuff up.

    Backtracking, I think I lied earlier when I said I had a moral victory this weekend. What I should have said was I had an immature, resentful, unsanitary victory this weekend. Let me clarify… People in the service industry really, really look out for one another. So, when 12 spoiled brats waste an hour and ten minutes and $379 worth of food and drinks by putting on a charade so they can get their kicks off getting a comp’ed meal, it’s not a good idea to walk to the bar across the street. We know that bar. We have friends at that bar. Our friends at that bar, they have cell phones… and they loved your story.

Don’t fuck with the people who serve your food or make your drinks.

I wish I was kidding.

I’m not creative enough to make this shit up.

Those were the days...

    With most of my past posts I normally blog about a common quark or one of the ins-and-outs of the service industry that are, at the least, entertaining or humorous to anyone regardless if they’re in the industry or not. This week, I guess I’m more purposing a question which can only be answered by those who have personally weathered the shit storm that is tending bar or waiting tables.

    I’m conscience of the fact that I do little more than just persistently bitch about the negative aspects of tending bar on these posts. The long hours, the constant bullshit, the smells, the sights…I arguably hate everything about bartending. I took the last nine days off, however, so I could catch up on school work and study for midterms. My first shift back was Saturday for Guavaween. As surprised as you may be to read this, I’m equally if not more surprised to write it; I was wicked stoaked to get back there. I wasn’t really sure why either. Bills are paid for next month, so I knew it wasn’t a financially driven motive. It honestly scared me a little bit that I was excited to get back behind there to pour another Goose and Red Bull for Chip McStripped-Shirt and his cronies. It really got me to thinking.

    There’s a number of responsibilities, jobs, and activities we all had growing up which we whole-heartedly despised but anytime we murmured a word under our breath about how fucking lame it was, somebody older than always reiterated how we’d miss it when we were older. For me, it was double secessions for soccer. The last six weeks of summer, the hottest weeks of July and August, Coach Lepore dragged us out of bed at 7 am so he could run us for countless miles in unbearable heat only for us to take a two hour lunch break and come back to the fields at 2 pm to run the *same* drills we had executed just hours earlier. Back then, I hated that man, I hated those drills, I hated soccer. I literally laughed in the faces of LHS alumni who claimed we’d miss ‘these days.’ How on Earth would I miss going to bed at 10 oclock in the middle of the summer so I could wake up, run four miles, run drills, force fed *anything* for lunch because I was already on the brink of exhaustion, run drills, throw up, and then work out for another three when I could be smoking a lot (like a LOT) of pot, drinking stolen beer with my best friends, and simply doing nothing…like you *should* be doing during summer vacation? You know what I have to say to those pretentious, dickhead alumni now? I miss it. I miss it a lot.

    As I said with my first post, I can see the light of the day in the sense that I know I won’t have to be slinging drinks for too much longer. Hopefully, within the near future, I’ll be an actual responsible, contributing member of society. It makes me think how I will look back on these days. Will I only remember the pitiful attempts at humor and stench from the nine gallons of Aqua Di Gio Chip McStripped-Shirt is wearing? Or will it be one of those memories I look back at and just hope to God Marty McFly and Doc will come tearing up my driveway in the Deloraen any second so they can take me back to those moments, the moments I genuinely miss, even for just a one single night?