Wednesday, August 1, 2012
The Perils of Time-Mismanagement
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The Three Amigos
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Sunday, February 14, 2010
Hey St Valentine, Tomorrow, under the flag pole after G period, We Fight….
I’ve told you before the nites I absolutely *dread* tending bar more than any other are New Year’s, St. Patty’s Day, Gasparilla ect. Granted its great money, but its amateur hour and its not worth the mental torment I’m put through.
Every guy thinks that because his great-grandfather’s neighbor’s cousin’s milkman was ‘straight off the boat from Dublin,’ he’s got pure Irish blood runnin’ through dem vains. Every girl remembers the glory days with her sorority sisters at the Delta Blowa Dudea house when she could simultaneously pound straight Popov vodka from an ice luge while ambidextrously beating off two Sigma Datea Rapea fraternity brothers. For some reason unbeknownst to me, the vast majority of the people who come out on these drinking holidays think they’re still able to drink like they could 10-15 years ago… regardless to the fact that a ‘nite out’ any other day of the year consists of jalapeño poppers and splitting a round of 2-for-1 house Merlot with the gals from accounting. The point being; tending bar is tiresome on a regular basis… obnoxious doesn’t even begin to describe how fatiguing it is on said holidays when Amateur Hour is in effect and light weights (if you will) drink exponentially more than they ever need to.
I can officially put Valentine’s Day, or even the eve of Valentine’s Day, in the same category as all the other obnoxious holidays which open up Amateur Hour…but for a different reason. It’s difficult to iterate why for one specific reason. Lemmie describe my nite and maybe you can begin to understand where I’m coming from.
I had flat out forgotten Valentine’s Day was tomorrow until around 6 o’clock tonite…when it all hit me in a wave… like the ‘perfect storm’ starting to develop.
(Editor’s note: rest of post will be published tomorrow… not due to laziness this time, but rather fatigue. I’m a self proclaimed night owl, but it’s far too late even for this degenerate burnout right now. You’ve got my word… and if not, next drink’s on me…)
Monday, November 9, 2009
Not-So-Moral Victory
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.
Monday, November 2, 2009
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?
Monday, October 26, 2009
Storytelling
Monday, October 19, 2009
Like I’ve acknowledged in prior posts, I’m usually a pretty miserable son of a bitch in my ramblings here. The thoughts and ideas I have scrambling my brain midshift make it to this page as a form of therapy for me so I don’t commit an unhonorable form hari cari (I’m pretty sure that’s an oxymoron) as I’m pouring another Mich Ultra to Pecs McGoo because “I’m on Atkin’s… Watchin’ my carbs, brah.” I normally feel a sense of relief the second I start jabbering away at my keyboard. I think my subconscious knows that all the horrible garbage I’ve just witnessed and tucked up and away during my nine hour shift of slinging drinks will soon be released out of my head and on to a page… kind of the same way that monstrous, gargantuan inmate from the Green Mile used to literally suck the evil out of people. Tonight my aggravation took on a whole new form I’ve never dealt with prior.
The short and the end is that I’m pretty miserable as it is as I walk on shift. I know I need to make X number of dollars and I can quickly conclude that’s not going to happen because of the weather. It’s just simply too cold. Realizing this, I say brief prayer to the service industry Gods for a quick, painless shift (and by that I mean dumping three shots of Jameson and Bailey’s in my Dunkin Donuts Great One). I should have realized at the time that karma’s already stacked against me so nothing of the sort was possible.
See, when it’s wicked slow like tonight, you run into a couple of problems. For one, you’re standing around doing nothing but thinking about how much money you need to be making but aren’t. Then when somebody *finally* walks up, there’s no escaping them. When you engage a guest when it’s busy and he starts talking about how (insert mindless topic you have no interest in whatsoever here), its very easy to give the illusion you’re interested for a few moments and then use any number of excuses (greeting a new table, checking food in the kitchen, ringing in drinks on the computer, etc) to slither away. When it’s one on one, like tonight, you’re friggin trapped man. It’s doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, only having the one guest to entertain and to talk to. It’s just that Murphy’s Law always kicks in when it’s just that one dude.
99.8% of the time it you’re tending bar on a night the tumbleweeds are rolling in the distance and you’re entertaining one guest an hour, that single guy is always a depressing individual. He’s not depressing in the sense of “Oh, I just came home and found my wife banging the pool boy…and we don’t even own a pool.” He’s always depressing in the sense that he’s a ‘regular’ at the bar you work at, you see him *literally* every shift you work, and he offers the same mindless banter time and time again.
To those outside the industry, that may not seem that bad at all. You don’t realize, however, what a toll that takes on you as an individual. You first start to realize that this guy is, in all honestly, probably at your work more than you are and he’s not even paid to be there. You realize this guy has the same stock stories, jokes, and anecdotes he recycles ever two months. Most importantly, you realize how this guy has been coming up to see you, sucking back his Dewars on the rocks, for over two years and not once have you ever heard about his wife, son, daughter, niece, nephew, or job for more than maybe a minute. Nothing.
He probably spends six or seven hours a week in your vicinity and has never once cared to talk about something you or I would deem important or of value. The author of Waiter Rant, who only goes by the alias of The Waiter so his guests don’t know his actual identity, touched on the same topic. He said “It’s unfortunate. It’s unfortunate these people have almost no connection to the outside world. Their lives, dreams, hopes, and ambitions only come to life within these walls. The second they pay their tab and walk out our door, they are instantly nothing again.” He’s referring to the same sadness I see shift after shift. The depressing fact that so many people’s individual significance is dependant on the burnt out, scruffy haired, pot smoking college student who is paid to pour his drinks and listen to him literally talk about nothing.
THAT was my night tonight. The most ironic part about it… right now, this second… I wish he stayed for a few more rounds…babbling about the trade he made for Hines Word in his fantasy league so his teams weekly score would be that much higher…and then his tab would have been that much higher…and then my tip would have been that much higher…and then I’d have the money to buy that bag and I’d be that much…better.