August 11th, 2018

Saturday night on pow-wow weekend – and our best band in the house. This should be interesting.

I opted to leave the wallet and cell phone in the glove compartment, not wanting to dick around with the temp lockers for the night, seeing as I won’t be using them much anyway.  With Cherry off on Saturday nights, that leaves Jerry the Older and I manning the Lounge tonight.  I grab my cash and head on over.

Jerry’s already on hand, as he’s a punctual sort of guy, and Vera’s hard at work on getting the frell out of there. There’s people, but it’s admittedly a little empty looking. Jerry and I chat off and on as we work, and he indicates that it was like this last night too, but picked up later, presumably after events let out. As mentioned – August’s 1-2 punch of state fair and pow-wow tends to smack around our attendance numbers.

We had a passle of out of town guests at the bar, and one of them, a fairly inoffensive older gent, ended up getting cut off rather quickly.  Little things like, forgetting he had a beer in front of him, going and sitting at someone else’s seat and drinking theirs instead. etc.  Whether or not he was drunk, he was decidedly impaired in some fashion.  We had to decline service to him several times after that. He’d show up every hour or so and ask again.

Jerry and I both grabbed our dinner breaks. I’d eaten before coming to work so I just popped out to my car and dicked around with my phone for half an hour.

The band started on time and as was the case the last time around, I found them quite enjoyable. I’ve since learned that apparently they recently swapped out a lot of band members so maybe I never got to hear the one that rattled the walls so hard and made me want to stay away. Either way – they’re still great, and put on a great show. I didn’t even feel compelled to earplug it.

We did have an issue with a guest not respecting our service rules, and wow – Angela was on that like white on rice. She’s rapidly moving up in my opnion list.

Around 10.30pm or so the crowd did pick up for a bit as fair/pow-wow attendees filtered in, but it was never so hectic as to be maddening.

Shockingly – appearing in the crowd of pow-wow attendees, was one of our former barkeeps, who did us the courtesy (note my dry tone of voice here) of popularizing the Wild Turkey Old Fashioned as a drink of choice for our establishment.  I simply refer to him now as ‘He who shall not be named’. I may be giving him too much of a hard time, though.  Then again, maybe not, but – I’ll still treat him respectfully. He’s my guest tonight.

All in all – it was a pleasant evening.

Closing overvations :

• It’s amusing how bartenders gravitate towards bartenders. I had a regular customer tonight who tends bar at another casino.
• This was one of the rare nights where we had simply too many rushing the bar at last call and when our stop time came we had guys stranded.  “High and dry” seems a not entirely inappropriate metaphor, really, when you think about it.

Next up : Sunday