May 19th, 2018

Well hallo there – special guest bartender this week, as it’s one of our big convention center concerts. Never heard of the guys, though. Their press photo kinda looks like a boy band in cowboy getup. One of my co-workers thought they resembled a grown-up Menudo. (Remember them?). Either way, the parking lot looked pretty dreary for a band night.

I go to the cage to get my cash for the night, as I’m booked to be in the lounge and I run into Morgan, in the company of another poor sap in a Zebra skin… whom I don’t know at all. Morgan introduced ‘Darla’ to me, and we passed seperate ways. Well this wasn’t on the schedule. As it looked like we were running 3 deep behind the bar (which financially is suck-city, btw), I loaded up a little lighter on cash than I usually do, and then headed to the Lounge where my fears were confirmed. Yep. Three people behind the bar.

Ugh.

Well this sucks. Not just financially, either. See, we have two cash register stations. Three bartenders. While each register station supports two cash drawers, putting two barkeeps on one station creates a bottleneck -behind- the bar, because we could have 210 bartenders back there, but only two can be transacting business at any given moment, regardless. Still – what are you gonna do, right? Go home in a huff and make $0? That doesn’t help and it’s not even enough if a thing to claim some sort of moral victory by buggering off. Ah well.

Cherry & Jerry the Older were hanging out in the service bar, and they got just battered head to toe by the concert crowd, as that bar is a short hop from the convention center and those inside who are either 1.) sick of the line in the concert hall or 2.) want something other than the limited selection in there, all head out to the service bar. They’ll have been lucky to get a break. I usually just skip it under those circumstances.

The lounge by comparison was… well dead isn’t quite the right word, but put it this way. We sent both Morgan -and- Darla off to break within 10 minutes of each other, and I just watched the bar by myself for half an hour, and didn’t even break a sweat doing it.

I took my own break after they got back and did my thing.

Morgan by the way, is not all that enamoured of Darla. Partially because she’s rocking this ‘I’ve worked here before, I know everything’ vibe, and partly because she wilted out and went home early on her first weekend shift. Morgan had zero patience for that. Truthfully, I have a hard time with it myself. I’m of the opinion that if you’re behind that bar, you work that bar. If it’s busy? It’s busy. Breaks cease to exist. That includes smoke breaks, and I don’t even smoke. The bottom line is that when the bar is being hammered, you don’t leave your co-worker twisting in the wind, and I really don’t care how bad you’re having the nic fits. I’ll make an exception for restroom breaks because that’s just humane – but make ’em quick.

Personally, while wilting out on night one doesn’t bode well, I was more rankled by her attitude. I asked her to not leave the ice chest wide open so that it didn’t collect spilled liquor, garnishes, and whatnot, ‘cuz it makes the ice gross for people. She just took this ‘I don’t care, was told to do it this way’ attitude about it. While she did immediately check with a supervisor who backed up my request (impressive, because Charon’s just as guilty as anyone of leaving the damn thing wide open), I couldn’t help but take it as a ‘fuck you, you don’t know anything, I”m just gonna ask her instead’ kind of moment. I realize that not many here think anything about seniority, but in 11 months, I’ll have logged 10 years behind this silly bar and I’d -like- to think that I could make polite requests and have someone at least say ‘Hm…. might be a thing’, rather than just repeat ‘Don’t care.” multiple times to me.

I shelved my pissiness about that after half an hour or so because that doesn’t help me focus on my guests, but I took great amusement later on in the night as ‘Miss knows everything’ kept having questions to ask and/or kept screwing things up in ways that required intervention. Like serving shots to guests that already had beers. Not a big deal in most places. Totally against the rules in ours. That’s a write-up offense if it’s caught- if you’re lucky. They -can- fire you for it. I saved her ass big-time. I then went back and patiently explained to Darla that she needs to watch that shit more carefully because she was handing liquor to people who already had visible drinks in front of them.

The group was a pain, though. I had to untangle that knot three times until they finally got it into their head that I wasn’t backing down and fucked off.

ANYway.

The long and short of the remainder of the night was this : Quiet for most of the evening, and the lounge band was… well, the best word I could say is adequate. Once the big show let out we got slammed for about an hour or so, and then everyone buggered off to bed and it went back to quiet again.

I give Darla a little credit for asking questions, but I’m not currently all that impressed. She must have worked here before when I shifted down to part time from full time many years ago, because I don’t know her from Adam. Don’t care to at present, either.

I suppose we’ll see, but for the most part I’m not going to have to interact with her, so that’s a win. I’ll call it a benefit of seniority.

The night wrapped up without major incident, and tips were. Eh. Would have probably made close to two bills if it had just been me & Morgan, but splitting it three ways just sucks.

Closing observations :

Cocktail shakers have room for lots of stuff in them. You can chill multiple shots at once. Doing them individually, while I suppose you might argue a certain level of crasftsmanship or something, isn’t time-efficient and Darla needs to parse that.
Nights like this are another reason I cried inside when we shifted POS systems and they pulled our third register station out of the bar.

Next up : Sunday