Barback Me, Baby!

Written January 4th.

The bartending thing isn’t going to work out and I am desperately begging for my old position back.

The hesitation set in long before I accepted the position.  People I didn’t even know where coming up to me and saying, “So, I heard you’re going to be a bar back now?  Did you do that by choice?” 

“Well, yeah.  And I’m actually going to be, like, a bartender’s apprentice,” I corrected them.

Or so that’s what I was told.

The slimy ten-dollar bill guy even joked that I was the first guy in work history to demote himself.  Bartending didn’t seem like a demotion to me.  Little did I know that everyone else seemed to have a better grasp on what I’d actually be doing than I did.

On the first day on the job, I knew I had made a huge mistake within the first ten minutes.  It was New Year’s Eve and I was given two minutes worth of training by some hairy hobbit looking dude before he dashed away, leaving me on my own to keep the soda supply flowing for the entire building, including two bars and three restaurants.  Wait, huh?  Where are you going, Mr. Hobbit man?  I need some supervision here! 

That didn’t happen but I did survive the night, barely.  Let me also say that I wasn’t given an access key to the bar so I couldn’t even go in to grab supplies needed to keep everything stocked.  I had to stand in line with the hundreds of New Year’s drunkards and flag someone behind the bar down with my flailing hands to hand me cups so I could refill the holders.  And that irritated the bartenders because they were too busy mixing drinks to take the time out to help me.  Well, crap, it’s not my fault these people #1) hired me to begin on one of the busiest nights of the year and #2) didn’t have the proper materials or training for me to do my job to the best of my ability.

The hairy hobbit man is also incredibly abrasive and intense.  He takes his job way too seriously.  There’s nothing wrong with working hard and having pride in what you do but he’s acting as if there’s life-giving blood in those plastic bags instead of soda fountain syrup.  He also talks about two notches louder than the average person.  I don’t know if it’s because he’s so small he feels he needs to yell to carry his voice to the ears of those taller than him or what but he always comes off like he’s yelling and I don’t like that.  I don’t like when people raise their voice to me or anyone else because it makes me incredibly uncomfortable.  I also didn’t like the fact that when he’d change a bag he would remove the old one, sling it on the floor, consequently slinging the sticky syrup mixture onto the floor, as well as tossing the perforated cardboard flaps to the ground and the caps that go to the plastic bags.  I suppose he was thinking the bags needed to be changed so quickly that he didn’t have time to just freaking hand the bags to me, so as not to make a mess, and that throwing them to the floor would be a better idea.  I found that action to be rude and inconsiderate, especially when he was throwing those sticky materials in my direction, possibly getting that goo on my pants or newly purchased work shoes.  As I mentioned, he’s not replacing vital fluids or anything so he needed to ease up a bit.

I rang in the new year by mopping the floor, breaking down and throwing away cardboard boxes and getting elbow deep in sticky syrup.  I was actually going from one bar to the other to check on the cups when midnight hit.  All around me, people grabbed their loved ones and pulled them in for a kiss.  From one point of my vision to the other, everyone came together and embraced and the scene only accentuated my singularity.  It didn’t help that I felt utterly alone with what I was doing.  At least when I was in customer service, I was a part of a team and not just one half of the Mountain Dew duo.  We all mostly got along but I surely didn’t like this new man that I was paired with.  It didn’t help that I was barely acknowledged by the beverage servers.  They only spoke to me when they wanted me to hand them a cup while I was refilling the holders or to get out of their way as they passed by with a tray full of drinks.  And I thought being a customer service associate was at the bottom.  And maybe it is but I somehow managed to dig a hole and crawl inside, making my position even lower, as evident by the dismissal of everyone around me.  I suppose you can’t escape high school.  There will always be cliques, always be people who think they are better and higher than you are and won’t hesitate to let you know with their turned up noses and condescension.

You wanna know the sophisticated way we check to see if the fountain syrup bag needs changing?  Why, you stick your hand through the tiny cardboard cut out hole and feel up the bags!  Might not seem like a big deal but sticking my hand through that impossible small hole provided many scrapes to my fingers and put my hands in a chapped condition.  It was easy for the hobbit man to stick his entire arm through the hole but I couldn’t even stick my hand all the way through.  I don’t have gigantic hands but those holes were just too small.  And when I tried to tear the cardboard slightly to provide more room for my hand, the guy admonished me and said that would lead to the box’s collapse.  After that, I just tried my best to shove my hand in as far as it would go, leaving read streaks and irritation on my hand and arm.

And when a bag would start to feel empty, the guy pulled the bag out of the cardboard box and hung it up, allowing for the last bit of liquid to drain before changing the bag.  It also allows for a visual cue for when the bag needs to be changed.  After he did one bag, I decided to be a good little follower, show him I was paying attention, took some initiative and pulled out what I thought was an almost empty bag while he left to go stock some beer or find a ring or something.  When he came back, I pointed to the emptying Sunkist bag and told him what I had done.

His fuzzy eyebrows merged to create a deep crevice in his forehead and he shouted, “NO! Put that bag back in the box, it isn’t empty enough!”  Holy crap, okay mister!  Talk about a soda jerk!  I hurriedly squeezed the bag back into the box and then left to check the cups.  When I came back, I saw that the bag had once again been taken out.  I suppose it was empty enough then, although there was basically the same amount of liquid in that bag.  This guy didn’t make any sense!  His philosophy was to “work smarter, not harder,” which was complete bull when you recall the way he would change the bags, you know, by sloshing the syrup and chucking the plastic caps over his tiny shoulder.  “Don’t worry about it,” he told me.  “You just mop up anything you spill.”  Well, uh, if you’d carefully change the bags, you wouldn’t spill anything in the first place, thus removing the need to mop. 

And on Saturday night, I was introduced to another bar back that would be helping me out since the little hairy man was going to be off that day.  Not trying to be rude but I don’t think he was all there.  It was in the way he spoke and his behavior.  Luckily, he was behind the bar most of the time and I didn’t have to interact with him regularly but every time I went into the bar to ask him for cup refills, he would always give me the wrong number of sleeves.  The bar was quite noisy so when I asked him for three sleeves of cups, I said the word and even held up three fingers as a visual cue.  He even repeated the number back to me as confirmation and yet when he came back, he brought back five.  This went on the entire night.  I’d ask for one and he’d bring me three.  I’d ask for five and he’d bring six.  Huh?  I didn’t know what to do with all the extra cups so I just placed them over the cup holders for the next time I’d need to refill them.  I suppose it was good that the extra cups allowed me to avoid interacting with the numerically challenged man.

I tried to talk to my new bar supervisor the first night I started to tell him I wanted to go back to my old position but he said he didn’t have time to talk to me and that I should come in early the next day to chat.  Uhh, okay.  The next day, I did just that and told him I didn’t want to do this anymore.  Before I did that, I asked him some specific questions about the job.  When I first applied, he told me he wasn’t even in need of a bar back but would train me as a bartender.  I assumed the soda room would be a one time deal just to get me acquainted with all aspects of the bar and drinks.  Yet, when I looked at my schedule, it had me in the soda room for the foreseeable future.  Even the hairy hobbit man said that I was better off in customer service.  Also, I asked the head bar guy several times about my pay.  He was really dodgy with his answer, first telling me it would be a pay raise and then giving me an estimate of how much I’d be making.  That’s how much I was making as a customer service associate.  Not really a pay raise.  And I wasn’t really a bartender in training.  I wasn’t even a bar back at that point.  I was the soda guy, the lowest of the low.  The head bartender guy had obviously misinformed me about what I’d be doing.  I went ahead and told him I just wanted to revert back to what I was doing.

“Well, the HR people have gone for the day and they won’t be back until Monday and you wont’ be back into work until Tuesday so come in and we’ll talk to someone.”

I didn’t really understand what the big deal was.  I had only been doing this for about two days at that point.  Why couldn’t I just go into work the next day back on my same team.  Sure, I understand if there’s some paperwork that needs to be done but couldn’t that be done later just to finalize everything?  Why should I wait for approval?  The part that really sucks is the bar guy said he wasn’t sure if I’d be put on my same team, if I was able to get my old position back at all.  First of all, they might have already found a replacement for me, which I think is ridiculous because we had two people on my team that moved on to different positions about the second or third week on the job and they haven’t been replaced YET and here I am, only having been gone for two days, and they’ve got someone lined up to take my place?  That sucks.  Secondly, the hesitation to send me back to where I came from stems from the company not wanting people to hop from job to job.  While I can understand that, I’m not hopping from job to job.  I simply made a huge mistake and just want to go back to what I was doing before.  Almost like it never happened, you know?  It really doesn’t have to be as complicated as everyone is making it out to be. 

It’s just all so frustrating because I can’t believe I keep getting myself into these situations.  It would be comical if it weren’t so pathetic.  Remember, I hate customer service.  And yet I’m hoping and wishing that I can go back there.  It’s just so outlandish to me that I have to lie in bed at night and hope that I can go back to scraping ashtrays and wiping away everyone's greasy fingerprints. 

And in an interesting turn of events, as I was writing this entry, I got a call from a company that I had applied for several months ago asking me if I wanted to come in for an interview.  It's an office job, what I wanted in the first place.  No smoke.  No public to deal with.  Sounds good, right?  I accepted an appointment for an interview.  I'm going to go and do my best during the interview and see where it goes from there.  If I don't get a call back I won't be upset but if I do get a call back and possibly a job offer, what am I going to do?  Should I take it?  I thought this bartending thing would be great but it turned out to be worse.  What if this is the same situation?  Should I take another risk and probably end up failing yet again or should I just play it safe and stick to what I hate but what I know?  Ugh, this is such bad timing, too.  Here I am, wanting to get my old position back but if I accept this other job I'll be leaving them again.  That definitely won't look good for me.

Slice, slice.  More and more paper cuts.