Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Industry Hospitality and Creeping
I spent a little time in Bangkok a few years back. If my memory serves me, I believe that I initially went with the hopes of meeting a tribe of Bhuddists somewhere out in the jungles of northern Thailand who would adopt me as their American student and teach me about their superior zen lifestyle, much like would happen in one of those awesome Jean Claude Van Dam movies, and after several years of discovering the truth of my existence, I would return to the states and totally impress all the bartenders from my home town, compelling them to give me lots of free drinks. Instead, I completely immersed myself in the drug and alcohol culture of several Thai cities, venturing into the jungles occasionally, armed with psychotropic substances and bottles of whiskey as opposed to robes and scripture. Suffice to say, I certainly exceeded my expectations of a good time while in Southeast Asia.
The bars in Bangkok, for the most part, were all pretty much the same. For some reason ( I never understood this strange phenemenon ) The Dire Straights were almost always playing loudly on the stereo, young girls dressed in skimpy black spandex always harrassed the white guys for free drinks, and above every bar hung a bell that the bartender was required to ring loudly if she was going to give someone a free drink. In all my time in the bars, being a regular and spending extraordinary sums of money, I never recieved a free drink without the obnoxious jingle jangle of piercing sound in my brain first.
AMERICA
As everyone knows who has read this blog before, I am a bartender. With this career one is afforded several ammenities that are worthy of pointing out. 1. I can sleep late and still be able to accomplish things that most of the world would have to take a sick day in order to accomplish, such as making doctors appointments, visiting the verizon store, watching Oprah, etc., and I can do these things before my shift even starts. 2. The ladies dig me. 3. Free shit ( this is the important one ).Every lawyer who frequents my bar would happily give me a free consultation, at the very least, when I get arrested for urinating in public, as the people who work at the theaters give me free tickets, and the liquor reps give me free bottles of booze. Every time I walk into a bar and the bartender knows that I pour drinks for a living as well, I inevitably get free drinks.
The other night I walked into a bar to have a cocktail before dinner. There were two bartenders working, one of whom being a woman that knows me and the freakin chick I was with. She came over to us, asked us what we wanted, "Two malibu bay breezes, please, " and she quickly poured us our refreshing libations. I tried to hand her my plastic paying card, as we only wanted one drink each, but instead of closing us out, the transaction and conversation became weird. She said, "I'll hold onto this, don't worry, I'll just keep it open."
"No, just close it out," I responded, "We're only having one."
"Oh, okay, well take your card back and you can close out when you finish," she said, handing the card back to me and walking away.
My initial reaction to the awkwardness of the dialogue was that she was inconspicuously trying to give us our drinks for free, trying to keep it a secret from either a manager who may have lurking, or perhaps the other bartender. Of course I couldn't rely on that assumption and throw a few dollars in tip down on the bar and leave, and so when we finished our drink, I had to try to avoid the lesser known bartender, so as not to cause trouble, and ask the woman in question to close me out again.
As it turns out, I was charged, as I should have been, and the entire situation turned out to be a total manifestation of my industry psychosis. I was wrong in this instance about the bartender creeping around and making me feel sneaky and uncomfortable when I just wanted to catch a quick and relaxing buzz before dinner, but I think my feelings were justified, as I have been in such a position countless times before. I have had bartenders slide me a shot before, the entire time staring intently at the back of their managers head, hoping he/she wouldn't turn around and see, and I have been handed an overtly anorexic check before and asked by bartenders to make sure that only our eyes saw it. Also, at times in my career, I have done the same kind of thing, not realizing that a sneaky and creepy free drink is only insulting. It means that the recipient doesn't really deserve it, and by no fault of their own, they become an accessory to stealing. That isn't any way to show hospitality, now is it? I guess it's a damn shame all the bars in America don't have a bell hanging over them.
Also, for those of you who think my freakin chick and I drink malibu bay breezes, go fuck yourself.
The bars in Bangkok, for the most part, were all pretty much the same. For some reason ( I never understood this strange phenemenon ) The Dire Straights were almost always playing loudly on the stereo, young girls dressed in skimpy black spandex always harrassed the white guys for free drinks, and above every bar hung a bell that the bartender was required to ring loudly if she was going to give someone a free drink. In all my time in the bars, being a regular and spending extraordinary sums of money, I never recieved a free drink without the obnoxious jingle jangle of piercing sound in my brain first.
AMERICA
As everyone knows who has read this blog before, I am a bartender. With this career one is afforded several ammenities that are worthy of pointing out. 1. I can sleep late and still be able to accomplish things that most of the world would have to take a sick day in order to accomplish, such as making doctors appointments, visiting the verizon store, watching Oprah, etc., and I can do these things before my shift even starts. 2. The ladies dig me. 3. Free shit ( this is the important one ).Every lawyer who frequents my bar would happily give me a free consultation, at the very least, when I get arrested for urinating in public, as the people who work at the theaters give me free tickets, and the liquor reps give me free bottles of booze. Every time I walk into a bar and the bartender knows that I pour drinks for a living as well, I inevitably get free drinks.
The other night I walked into a bar to have a cocktail before dinner. There were two bartenders working, one of whom being a woman that knows me and the freakin chick I was with. She came over to us, asked us what we wanted, "Two malibu bay breezes, please, " and she quickly poured us our refreshing libations. I tried to hand her my plastic paying card, as we only wanted one drink each, but instead of closing us out, the transaction and conversation became weird. She said, "I'll hold onto this, don't worry, I'll just keep it open."
"No, just close it out," I responded, "We're only having one."
"Oh, okay, well take your card back and you can close out when you finish," she said, handing the card back to me and walking away.
My initial reaction to the awkwardness of the dialogue was that she was inconspicuously trying to give us our drinks for free, trying to keep it a secret from either a manager who may have lurking, or perhaps the other bartender. Of course I couldn't rely on that assumption and throw a few dollars in tip down on the bar and leave, and so when we finished our drink, I had to try to avoid the lesser known bartender, so as not to cause trouble, and ask the woman in question to close me out again.
As it turns out, I was charged, as I should have been, and the entire situation turned out to be a total manifestation of my industry psychosis. I was wrong in this instance about the bartender creeping around and making me feel sneaky and uncomfortable when I just wanted to catch a quick and relaxing buzz before dinner, but I think my feelings were justified, as I have been in such a position countless times before. I have had bartenders slide me a shot before, the entire time staring intently at the back of their managers head, hoping he/she wouldn't turn around and see, and I have been handed an overtly anorexic check before and asked by bartenders to make sure that only our eyes saw it. Also, at times in my career, I have done the same kind of thing, not realizing that a sneaky and creepy free drink is only insulting. It means that the recipient doesn't really deserve it, and by no fault of their own, they become an accessory to stealing. That isn't any way to show hospitality, now is it? I guess it's a damn shame all the bars in America don't have a bell hanging over them.
Also, for those of you who think my freakin chick and I drink malibu bay breezes, go fuck yourself.
Monday, March 23, 2009
economy, huh?
Last night I had an interesting conversation. I left work early, being the opening bartender on a night where my once typical crowd of cocktail enthusiasts were probably home watching cnn and considering their long term plans of financial savings, and I had dinner alone at the bar of a restaurant down the street. Next to me sat the overly flamboyant manager of some business located blocks away from my restaurant. He engaged me in conversation about random politics of the town in which we both reside, and in hearing that I was a bartender at one of the most prestigous restaurants in town, the topic of the global economic crisis inevetibly came up. He asked me, in an overtly skeptical way, whether or not I was personally being affected by the economic downfall. Being the honest man that I am ( for those of you who know me personally, please be kind ), I told him that I was in fact making significantly less money than I was a year ago. He then asked me the classic question that I have been asked over and over again by every ignorant fool who has had the luxury of keeping their job and salary throughout this situation, "Okay, well do you think it's just the media hype that is causing people to go out to restaurants less? I mean, I am still making the same money that I was last year, or the year before, and most people I know are still making the same money. It seems to me that everyone is just falling into this trap of freaking out because the news programs are telling us to."
Several months ago, perhaps, I would have taken that question seriously. I can actually remember a time in the not so distant past when I blamed Dan Rather, or whoever the fuck, for scaring people into not buying $16 glasses of wine from my bar. Ha.
Earlier today, as I was having a few cocktails(beers and shots of whiskey), I ran into one of my old regulars at a local dining and spirits establishment(shitty bar). He was drinking guiness and doing shots of jameson, as opposed to the expensive scotch and premier cru wines that I am used to seeing him ingest, and yelling obnoxiously about how he wanted to just get tanked because he couldn't deal with the fact that he just laid off a hundred or so employees from his company. He made ridiculous drunken claims, like it was all his fault, and that he had ruined the lives of countless families, and of course, talked about how much he loved everyone that had worked for him, "even the guys that swept the floors of my warehouse. I knew where they all lived, and I would bring bagels to their houses in the morning and meet their families. I thought of them as my families."
Yeah. So that sucks. As much as I hate being the guy who took this enormous pay cut as a bartender, I would hate even more to be the guy who feels guilty about drinking good scotch, even if he could obviously afford it, because of the people that he had to send to the unemployment line. Even more than that, I would hate to be the guy in the unemployment line. And even more than that, I would hate to be the ignorant fuck who is asking questions about the legitamite nature of this financial crisis to complete strangers, in a public place, just because his or her salary has not been compromised. Yeah dude, this stimulas plan, the unemployment rate, and the millions of families who are struggling to make normal human ends meet, are probably the result of some "hype" being sponsored by the media.
Several months ago, perhaps, I would have taken that question seriously. I can actually remember a time in the not so distant past when I blamed Dan Rather, or whoever the fuck, for scaring people into not buying $16 glasses of wine from my bar. Ha.
Earlier today, as I was having a few cocktails(beers and shots of whiskey), I ran into one of my old regulars at a local dining and spirits establishment(shitty bar). He was drinking guiness and doing shots of jameson, as opposed to the expensive scotch and premier cru wines that I am used to seeing him ingest, and yelling obnoxiously about how he wanted to just get tanked because he couldn't deal with the fact that he just laid off a hundred or so employees from his company. He made ridiculous drunken claims, like it was all his fault, and that he had ruined the lives of countless families, and of course, talked about how much he loved everyone that had worked for him, "even the guys that swept the floors of my warehouse. I knew where they all lived, and I would bring bagels to their houses in the morning and meet their families. I thought of them as my families."
Yeah. So that sucks. As much as I hate being the guy who took this enormous pay cut as a bartender, I would hate even more to be the guy who feels guilty about drinking good scotch, even if he could obviously afford it, because of the people that he had to send to the unemployment line. Even more than that, I would hate to be the guy in the unemployment line. And even more than that, I would hate to be the ignorant fuck who is asking questions about the legitamite nature of this financial crisis to complete strangers, in a public place, just because his or her salary has not been compromised. Yeah dude, this stimulas plan, the unemployment rate, and the millions of families who are struggling to make normal human ends meet, are probably the result of some "hype" being sponsored by the media.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
When will you get a real job?
As a bartender I am constantly subjected to one of the most insulting, insensitive, and ignorant questions that a professional in any business can be asked. "When will you get a real job?" is a staple inquiry from my customers, friends, x-girlfriends, family, and even colleagues. It seems to be appropriate to everyone, I suppose, because of the myth that anyone working in the restaurant industry is either in college with greater career aspirations, or an actor waiting for their big break in Hollywood.
I am neither. My acting career took a turn for the worse in 6th grade when my drama teacher asked me if I would be interested in becoming a stagehand, and my college experience ended when I realized that most graduates of music and english were lucky to find employment making salaries that I was making as a busser at Charlie Brown's when I was seventeen.
So, I became a bartender. I work in a beautiful restaurant and I take my job seriously. I show up on time every day with my shirt pressed, a smile on my face, and I offer the rest of the community of people with 'real jobs' an experience and a product that makes them feel good. When you think about it, it's quite a bit like tv producers, iphone manufacturers, video game technicians, rock stars, talk show hosts, clothing designers... You get the point, right ?
So why restaurant workers? Why is it assumed that what we do isn't real? Perhaps it's the hours. When you start your workday during happy hour does your work cease to be real? Maybe. Maybe all of us in this industry are strange little hollographic nighttime unicorns, prancing around in a dimension that doesn't even exist, waiting for a genius quantum physicist to uncover the incomprehensible construction of the molecules in our cartoon bodies, so that he can liberate us from our non-worlds, so that we may either take a huge pay cut or find a less pleasurable life in joining the class of people with 'real jobs.'
Chris Harrington
Bartender/Cartoon
I am neither. My acting career took a turn for the worse in 6th grade when my drama teacher asked me if I would be interested in becoming a stagehand, and my college experience ended when I realized that most graduates of music and english were lucky to find employment making salaries that I was making as a busser at Charlie Brown's when I was seventeen.
So, I became a bartender. I work in a beautiful restaurant and I take my job seriously. I show up on time every day with my shirt pressed, a smile on my face, and I offer the rest of the community of people with 'real jobs' an experience and a product that makes them feel good. When you think about it, it's quite a bit like tv producers, iphone manufacturers, video game technicians, rock stars, talk show hosts, clothing designers... You get the point, right ?
So why restaurant workers? Why is it assumed that what we do isn't real? Perhaps it's the hours. When you start your workday during happy hour does your work cease to be real? Maybe. Maybe all of us in this industry are strange little hollographic nighttime unicorns, prancing around in a dimension that doesn't even exist, waiting for a genius quantum physicist to uncover the incomprehensible construction of the molecules in our cartoon bodies, so that he can liberate us from our non-worlds, so that we may either take a huge pay cut or find a less pleasurable life in joining the class of people with 'real jobs.'
Chris Harrington
Bartender/Cartoon
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