Bar Brawl

Ok so not really, but we got really close.

This was an interesting weekend. We had pretty much the whole spectrum of things going on. On Friday night we just got slammed. We were hammered the entire night. We sold more bitter than I think we've ever sold in a night since I've been here. For example, we sold something like 2 and a half casks of bitter during the day. A cask is 36 gallons which works out to 288 pints. Total that all up and you get something like 720 pints, just of bitter. That was the kind of night we were having. We also almost ran out of glasses. On the weekends we have one of the kitchen guys come down and clean glasses for us to make it easier for us to serve. This particular night however, it was all he could do just to pick up glasses from the floor because the place was so packed. At one point we were down to about 20 pint glasses out 2 or 3 hundred we normally have stocked. I hopped on dish duty and just washed as fast as I could. I pretty much kept it at level, slowly increasing the amount we had for the next hour or so. By the end of that time we maybe had 40 glasses up on the shelves. Not good. It was like that all night. It was a blast. We're all usually in pretty good spirits during times like that because, well, if we're not we're going to snap like twigs.

Saturday was much more interesting. It was pretty dead that night. There just weren't that many people coming out for the most part. We had the normal early evening rush, but after that things just died. We did get ht pretty hard at the end of the night though. There was a pub crawl that came in with 50 people or so. That's a lot of people to serve drinks at the same time. The real interesting part came during the lull. A group of maybe twenty people or so came up and starting shouting, I think that's an apt description, their orders at the bar. Turns out that one guy was paying for all of it and I happened to be serving this guy. As is pretty normal, he starting asking for name brands, Jack Daniel's or Southern Comfort (this got me in trouble), that while we don't actually have we serve something in the same class, a bourdon or liquor. I of course told the man this because we can get into trouble for not. So I'm two thirds of the way through this guys order when one of his friends starts shouting at the bar. This "gentleman" was angry that his So Co didn't taste right. I explained to him what the situation and he responded that I didn't tell him that. I told no, I didn't, I told the guy ordering drinks. At this point he accuses me of lying and starts to get a little unhinged. He insults me, starts shouting and is generally behaving like an ass. Neil walks over. They walk down the same road he and I went down and than things started to get really nasty. He insults me some more and than starts going after the pub. Not smart. He asks if we advertise, tell him no, and he calls our stuff rubbish. Really not smart. At this point Neil just starts making fun him. The guy tries to order something and Neil just makes a fool of the guy. That went on for a little while before eventually the guy got so pissed his friends had to pull him away. Which is good, because he just about got a beating he wouldn't have forgotten for a long time. During this whole interchange everything at the bar stopped. I was right there with Neil to my right and Russell to my left. The other three guys down there are just all standing there waiting for this guy to make a move. The way our bar is set up, you would have to lean really far over to take a swing at one of us, at which point he would have been pulled onto the bar and beat around the head until he stopped moving, his friends pulled him, off, or the Met showed up. Either way, bad ending for that jackass. They also walked out on a 40 plus pound bar tab.

Sunday was rather uneventful. It was just dead all day. Nothing really interesting happened work wise. A lot of things broke though. One of our best selling beer taps broke so we were short one, the big dishwasher broke downstairs, and a fridge broke upstairs. That made the day a little more interesting, but it was still really manageable.

Monday was another story. We weren't really that heavily staffed because Marc and Russell had family here and Neil didn't expect it to be busy. The day started pretty mellow downstairs, busy for a Monday afternoon, but nothing too bad for two of us. Upstairs was another matter however. Caelly was alone and just getting slammed with food orders. I went up and helped her out for awhile. Their fridge had ben fixed so I ran to the cellar to get that for her and loaded up the fridge. Went up and helped again a little later and than I was on break. Didn't really do much on my break. The night was a whole different matter. I came down at five and Jade was getting slammed. We were serving as fast as we could and the lines were only getting longer. Russell came down at 6 and twenty minutes or so later we were down to about 8 pint glasses. For the next hour and a half I did nothing but glasses. Luckily one of the kitchen girls, Michelle, came and helped clear the floor but it was still barely enough. We burned through change, kegs, ice, lemons and pretty much everything else we had downstairs. It was absolutely manic. I was done at 10 and things had calmed down a lot but they were still going to be busy for quite a while tonight.