Notes from your Bartender: Part One.

Am I a babysitter? 

Ok, before I get too Carrie Bradshaw about all this here’s a disclaimer: I wish I could write about something else, but I spend most of my days behind a wooden barrier giving people liquid drugs for money, so I gotta write articles about it. Here’s the first. 

The answer to this question is yes. I’ve worked a lot of service jobs in my time, but only during the all-day graveyard shifts of Sunday and Monday at a local bar do I realise I have transitioned out of Horeca and into social work. Bring me your tired huddled masses, your pensioners, your middle-aged men that come to me and drink instead of therapy. Society, bring your most fucked individuals and send them to me so I can get paid to talk to them. 

A Sunday or Monday shift is a specific beast. You will make almost no revenue, and so run the bar alone to cut costs. Business is slow, so there’s no real physical work to do. No customers mean no restock, and no need to clean glasses or wipe tables. There’s only so much shit one can polish. The work on these shifts is endurance. Endurance and talking. Especially as one half of the conversation pair is getting plastered. 

Listen to this. 4PM. Bar opens. Enter my first customer. Elderly Dutch man. I do not know it yet, but he will stay until we close at 1AM. He will stay after last call and sit after closing as I clean. I do not know it yet but I am about to embark on an 11 hour conversation. The customer will drink 5 beers during this time. When it is time to go home, I will usher him out. He returns 3 minutes later and waves me outside. He is confused and has forgotten where he lives and is upset I do not know where his house is. “Which way do I go?” he yells. I use google maps and find out he lives on the exact same street as the bar. It is less than a minute away. We will do this again tomorrow. 

The majority of our customers on a Sunday and Monday are single men. This isn’t surprising. But what is it that makes men go drink alone? Now, I work in a bar. I enjoy an alcoholic beverage, as many of us do. It pays for my stuff. But every so often, after watching the same dude getting blasted alone on a Monday afternoon, I do start asking myself “don’t any of these people have anywhere else to be?”. The answer, is of course, no. I like these guys most of the time – they’re well behaved, hold their booze, and tip well. But there is undeniably a palpable sense of loneliness (possibly projected) that the booze just amplifies. 

Since working with alcohol, I’ve developed a very strange relationship with it. I never drink at work, and rarely drink after a shift. The idea of habit scares me – I’m not alone in this, more young people are teetotal now than ever before. But I still enjoy drinking, and for me, it’s part of the human experience. But more often than not, it feels like with these dudes I could cut beer out the equation. Most of them just want a quiet place to sit, and a little conversation – drinking seems to be the only way we know how to access this at 5pm on a Monday afternoon. Perhaps I’ll put checkers boards on the bar, and serve tea. I’ll become a professional friend, rather than a drunk people babysitter.