The reality of pub work
Sunday, January 24, 2016
So, last night I had my first ever experience of working on
a pub floor, from 9pm until 1am, and it was quite the surreal experience, so I
figured I would write about it. Here are some things I learned about what it’s
like to work in a bar:
- Four hours is a DAMN LONG TIME. Seriously. I kept thinking to myself, ‘okay, so I’m an eighth of the way there… In another five minutes it’ll be two eighths… twelve more songs and I’ll be half way through the shift.’ My feet were crying in blistered agony by the end of the night, and the endless routine of picking up glasses and almost slipping over in puddles of spilled drinks dragged horrendously.
- Drunken young men’s dancing is the single most horrifying sight in this world. People complain about ‘dad dancing’ but I feel that ‘lad dancing’ is the true horror that isn’t addressed enough. This leads me on to the third revelation that came from this shift…
- Broken glass on the floor will not discourage a drunken dancing young man to attempt a forwards roll. It is not your responsibility to stop it. You will get kicked in the face.
- You will also be hit in the face by many handbags and flailing arms.
- Intoxicated men have really weird methods of flirting; it is your job to smile politely and pretend that blowing on your face or yanking on your ponytail and shouting ‘AYYYY’ is a perfectly acceptable way to have banter with a stranger. You will probably also encounter a lot of men who are ‘sure they’ve seen you somewhere’. Ew.
- A smile or simple ‘thank you’ from a customer will absolutely make your day. I was really struggling to keep my spirits up, never having done anything like this before and being thrown at the deep end rather with a shift at such a busy time on a Saturday night. Someone could do as much as nod at me in acknowledgement as I collected a glass and I’d be thinking about it fondly for the next ten minutes.
Last of all, I learned that as a student I really will do
anything to get a bit of extra dollar. The student life is a hard one, and we have
to do all sorts of weird, mundane and difficult things just to survive. The
beauty of this, though, is that it makes us more mature and capable of dealing
with life’s more stressful times. It’s also given me so much more respect for
the staff members I’ve always taken for granted, in a sense. Definitely an
eye-opening experience; I left with a sense of new enlightenment, new
confidence in my ability to hack the working life and a great deal of beer on
my clothing.
Cheers!
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