Wednesday, July 14
Distractions Are, Erm, Distracting
I was full of good intentions on Sunday, all prepared, ready and willing to do a hell of a lot of blogging. Then one thing and another came up, got in the way and distracted me. I can't help it, these things just happen!But anyway, I'm once more prepared, ready and willing to write a serious amount of material. I've got the MLB All-Star game on the TV, a big bottle of water by my side, my laptop on my legs, and (rather annoyingly) the street cleaner directly outside the window, making a shitload of noise.
I was talking about the various nights I'd worked last week, and seeing as I also worked this very evening, that sounds about the right place to continue.
Friday was very dead, as I said earlier, but nothing could have prepared me for Saturday's "work". The first thing I was told about when I turned up at X at 6 in the evening was that someone had died in the pub on Friday night. This only came up when I mentioned that Y had been "dead" on the Friday night. Oh, the bitter, bitter irony.
Or not, come to think of it. The overuse of the words "irony" and "ironically" by various people on TV is a particular bugbear of mine and Pete's (a housemate). And before anyone mentions it, yes I know that Ms Morissette obliterated the use of the word in her song.
None of the events in her lyrics could be considered ironic in the true sense of the word. Coincidental, yes. Unfortunate, possibly. Ironic? Not at all.
Irony is a dramatic term which is used when an audience is aware of something that the character on stage isn't. This is most commonly evident when a scene is immediately preceded by another scene where a plan or plot is discussed that a character in the latter scene is unaware of. The audience is thus informed, whilst the character isn't.
A "no smoking sign on your cigarette break" is most definitely not ironic. Rant over.
So, Saturday night's work. This was the most bored I have ever been whilst working behind a bar. I was at the same downstairs bar as I was on the previous Saturday night, but this night was unbelievably quiet. At the end of my five-and-a-half hours down at that bar, I had served less than 30 drinks.
And I did count it up in one of the ultra-lengthy periods between customers, so I know that it was less than 30 drinks. The worst period was the 100 minutes where I quite literally pulled 2 pints. 2 fucking pints in nearly 2 hours! Dear God was I bored.
The worst thing was that although there was a TV on downstairs, it didn't have any sound because the music for the pub was being pumped through the sound system. One positive to come from that is that I managed to watch Liar Liar without having to actually hear Jim Carrey. He's funny enough visually that I was smirking a few times watching it from afar. The fact that I'd seen it too many times already, knew the storyline and most of the actual lines spoken is neither here nor there...
I did bugger all for the rest of the evening there, until I went back upstairs to the main bar after closing mine down and cleaning up (which I managed to drag out long enough so that I got upstairs after they'd finishing serving too. Yay for me). One of the seemingly endless supply of foreign bargirls, who speak quite broken English, announced that it was time for a drink, and that that included me.
She was already pretty pissed, as she took great delight in repeatedly informing me in a louder-than-usual voice. I don't know which country she is from, but I think her accent has an hispanic twang to it, possibly Brazilian. She kept saying "You good guy, I like you, you very good guy." Hell, I'll take compliments, even from drunk randoms.
A quick drink followed, which destroyed my staying alcohol-free regime that has been quite successful recently. Note to self: Aftershocks are only to be drunk when you're quite drunk already. They BURN, especially so when you haven't touched any alcohol for over a week (again, yay for me).
I declined on the round of absinth that followed, on the principle that absinth is undrinkable when your taste buds haven't been dulled by a night of beer and other drinks first. I've only ever managed 2 absinths in one night, never any more, and I have to say that they didn't have quite the hallucinogenic effect that I was expecting. Certainly, their alcohol content aided my descent into the inevitable 2am drunk oblivion, but I don't remember being particulary fucked over by the absinths themselves.
The fact that I don't usually remember much of the many nights out where they get to the point of absinth suddenly being a viable drinking option is irrelevant (ish).
When I left the pub sometime around 11.30, I was sort of in the mood for going out and getting smashed. That Aftershock must have reawoken a feral desire for being drunk and incapable. I tried to ring a couple of my housemates, got no answer, and tried a third. I was walking down Regent St at the time, with the vague intention of going to Burger King if all else failed.
I managed to get my housemate on the phone, and rather weirdly, he was on a bus heading down Regent St to go meet a friend and then to head to a club (Afterschool, I believe). It ended up with me walking alongside his bus, chatting to him on the phone whilst we were looking at each other. Very strange.
It ended up with me deciding not to go out, so I grabbed a burger and headed home. A great way to spend a Saturday night, right?
Which all brings me to today. I was back at Y this evening, doing my first shift of the week. Nothing too much that needs reporting happened, to be honest. I chatted to a few of the regulars, including one that I hadn't spoken to before. He turned out to be a really interesting, funny guy. He has a double hair-lip, and thus looks a little strange, but he is a genuinely nice guy. Utterly harmless, a great sense of humour, and a great conversationalist.
I also talked football for a little while with a couple of the other regulars, and I realised that although it has been less than 10 days since the end of Euro 04, I'm already missing watching football on TV. At least it's only 3 weeks until the start of next season and the resumption of Sunday afternoons in the pub, on the right side of the bar again.
That was a little light reading for you, I'll start a new post to talk about something else.
1 Comments:
Hate to tell you this but your definition of irony is actually correctly known as dramatic irony. You're not the only one to have ever studied English Lit.
Kate (http://screamtoasigh.blog-city.com)
By 
, at 11:59 PM
