2005-02-21

Saturday. My last closing shift at the bar. I arrive in a pre-emptive state of annoyance. The new staff are useless. I can�t be arsed to introduce myself to any of them. We are continuously mobbed by a seething gaggle of customers from 6 PM onwards. The manager decides to help out by jumping behind the bar. She is Rubenesque, to put it delicately, with an arse of epic proportions. Being behind the bar with her is like being trapped in a small stable with an angry Clydesdale. She ricochets around the enclosed space like a bowling ball in polyester, nearly knocking me over with her epic arse and treading on my feet until they feel like pain-flavoured mashed potatoes. I am sick of her imperious demands and I serve up great steaming helpings of attitude like so much Clydesdale excrement. By the end of the night, she hates me. I don�t give a fuck. (I do not plan to use this place as a reference: I won�t need to, because if I ever reach the point of having to work in a bar again I will immediately commit suicide.) A drunken gorp decides to make fun of my accent, and does so by repeating everything I say in a cartoonish Irish brogue. FOR THE LAST TIME PEOPLE I AM NOT IRISH. He doesn�t even have the wherewithal to look embarrassed when I tell him I�m from Canada. Closing up takes forever. Evil Fat Bitch makes us mop the floor twice. I sit down and have a fag while everyone else is still cleaning, rolling my eyes like a sullen teenager. Fuck this shit. The End.

There are a few things I will miss about the bar now that I�m finally out of there: drinking at the casino after work was always a larf, despite the horrors of the carpet in that place, which looks like a hallucinogenic nightmare spawned by Hunter S. Thompson*. But the prospect of actually having my weekends to myself for the first time in six months makes me nearly delirious with joy. Nine to five! The workaday grind! The rat race! Commuting! Oh, how I�ve missed thee!

* Dear old Hunter! I suppose it was only fitting that it should end this way.