WORKING IN AN IRISH BAR: WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING

Dublin, Tuesday, 30th April 2013 - 12pm

THE TRIAL

The bar manager is a small, clean cut man of quick steps and a confident manner. I have been at Temple Bar Pub for only around an hour and have already seen him walk purposefully up and down, like he has no time to hover in a place that is otherwise seemingly characterised by a rather slow, leisurely pace at this time of day. He really does look like we are the least of his worries and I wonder if anyone is keeping an eye on us who are on a trial. We have been emptying ashtrays in the beer garden and clearing the occasional table for the last sixty minutes, but there isn’t much to do on the floor, so we just glance around every now and then trying to identify the owner, or anyone who might look like they're paying attention. I don’t see anyone, so I just busy myself wiping clean tables and wandering around trying to look diligent, until the manager appears out of nowhere and calls us to a corner of the sidebar, pulls up a stool for himself and asks us to take a seat.

He's probably noticed that I'm wearing the wrong shoes for a bar job -and the wrong accent... I've asked a question and he's narrowed his eyes slightly, I don't sound Argentininan, he says (the accent's a whole different story which I posted here). I'm sure this is enough for him to sense the truth: I don't even drink, I've never even had a beer in my life and I was turned away from another bar not far from this one a couple of days ago. But he doesn't have the time right now and before I start making up a history of hospitality jobs he stands up from his seat, hands us a menu each and says in a thick Irish accent: 

Come back on Tursday at tree.

Thurday,  2nd May 2013 - 4pm

It was four of us, we stood outside his office looking like students waiting to be called in to sit an exam. The interview actually resembled an exam quite closely, with him shooting questions about draft beers, whiskeys and food -all of which I had been looking up on the internet-. He asked me if I could multitask and I replied: ‘Sure. I’m a teacher.’ (seriously, Victoria?), he didn't ask about my previous experience and I believe he found my English to be oddly good, so I got the job - I think.

Argentina, November 2020

THE WAITRESS

Tha's how I went from working a mere twenty-five hours a week as a secondary school teacher in Argentina to working 60+ hours a week collecting glasses, serving tables and recommending beers I had never so much as tasted.

There had been another person present in the office when I was interviewed. She was an unusually but gracefully tall, lean Mexican who managed to look elegant in an apron and had the lofty air of someone who knew herself to be good at her job, which was why she was in charge of her own squad of minions - the floor staff. This was a rather mismatched group of people in their 20s with a wide range of English language skill levels, varying degrees of competence in the job and a high turnover rate. On my first day I followed my Mexican supervisor around as she explained (in Spanish, but in a businesslike manner) bar areas, cleaning checklists and drink orders, to then take me down to the kitchen, where an order of five large plated sandwiches waited on the pass. Here, she picked up the food docket and turned to me with rather bored eyes for yet another expanation. Her makeup was flawless under the white kitchen light, her skin looked like porcelain, and her eyebrows were slightly raised when she said:

I can carry five plates, but it’s OK if you can carry three.

It was more of a warning than a simple remark -she too knew I was clueless-, so she handed me two of the sizabale plates and taking the rest herself marched back upstairs without another word, with me tailing her. I was officially one of her minions now: not only because I was almost twenty centimeters shorter, didn't have an ounce of makeup on and looked generally invisible next to her regal 180cm, but also because I had no idea how to do the simplest of jobs -I wouldn’t have known what to do with a third plate until later, when one of the waiters, a Uruguayan boy, saw me hasitating at the pass in front of multiple plates of food,  and showed me how to carry them.

 

THE JOB

As I had arrived in Dublin from Argentina, I had spent two long weeks climbing up the walls until I had finally landed this job. There was an initial sense of exhilaration (I got a job!) which quickly wore off to give way to twelve hour shifts in what was possibly the busiest bar in the whole of Ireland. 

At first I was all over the shop. I started out by losing money from my float (the €50 waitresses got at the start of every shift to take quick payment for drinks around the bar), and I had to compensate it with my tips at the end of the day. The pace at which the staggering number of incoming tourists flooded every corner of the bar proved to be too much for me to handle because, apparently, dealing with endless drink and food orders coming at me from every direction in a sea of people was not the same as managing a class of seated teenagers. 

Then there were the working hours, too. In the first few months I was rostered to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and I have the distinct memory of walking back home in a daze of exhaustion at 4am, after my first 15 hour shift on a Saturday. I had never worked that much in my life before and this was a period in which all I did beside work was take showers, wash my uniform and crawl to bed. I didn't shy away from it, though, even if it did take a good few weeks for the crankiest bartenders  to stop yelling at me from behind the bar: be quicker, be more careful; did you close this tab??; don’t stand there, move, we’re busy; Change this keg, be fast!; this pint’s been sitting at the bar for ages; the beer garden needs sweeping and the ashtrays need emptying; get behind the bar and do glasses now!!

Days were long. It was normally cruisy up until midday, when people started flocking in, lured by the sound of Irish folk songs being played live. After that, it was like a floodgate gradually opening throughout the day and it rarely subsided before closing time: the place was usually overflowing by ten at night, when getting to the bar was mission impossible. Waitresses, however, had to wade through the crowd and retrieve empty glasses which seemed to reproduce in the most inaccessible corners. We stacked them way above our heads - maybe ten, twelve pint glasses so that if you were behind the bar, you would see the pile approaching, towering over people's heads before you could see the person carrying them squeezing through to reach the bar top. Admittedly, this was  a dangerous practice. Once, on a particularly busy night, someone put a glass on top of the stack one of the waitresses was carrying and the careless pressure applied caused the pile to crack all the way to the base, making the girl let go of the glasses, which smashed in a heap of shards on the floor. Then the swaying crowd pushed her forward and she landed with her bare hands on the glass. 

Regardless, after the first couple of weeks were behind me and I was able to relax into my new job, I found it all very entertaining and sometimes even efortless, like I was playing a game. An interesting part of it were the tips: at the beginning, I didn’t really expect people to tip me -we’re not great tippers in Argentina-, but at the end of every long shift, my apron pocket would be bulging and clinking and I quickly got used to it, especially because during the summer months I would easily cover rent and food expenses with tip money. To some of the waiting staff it was like a treasure hunt, they spotted tippers and went avidly after them, to me it was part of the game I was playing and it made for good stories, too. Sometimes people were amusingly ridiculous about it, like when I made a slight miscalculation when giving a Spanish man his change after I had been waiting on his family, which resulted in him chasing me down because I still owed him 10 cents. Other times, people were so generous and took this tipping business so seriously that it seemed a bit over the top, like when a group of Canadian ladies, having been horror-stricken upon realising they had forgotten, came rushing back from their hotel to tip me. They also came back the next day and tipped me some more (begged me to take a tip) before they had even found a place to sit (please, please take it, we had nightmares about it!). 

But it was the social aspect of it that I enojoyed the most. Each day was different and you hardly ever had time to get bored.  Temple Bar was at the hub of the touristic quarter in Dublin, people came to us for a cheecky pint before checking into their hotels -lugagge and all- and again on their way to the airport at the end of their trip. More often than not, I'd find myself sharing my life story with complete strangers and hearing all about their travel itineraries; I would get invitations from grateful old couples to visit them in their home countries; tips from people I had barely had a chat with; contact details and job offers from enthusiastic Americans; business cards from business owners; and drunken marriage proposals from men whose courage and sense of humour were spurred on by alcohol.

I spent so much time inside Temple Bar that I think I could have collected enough ethnographic data for some kind of cross-cultural study (except I couldn't have, because I don't know the first think about cultural studies). Never again after Temple Bar did I experience something quite like this. Among other things, my time there hightened my awareness of cultural stereotypes and it reinforced not only the belief that we should be wary of them, but also the conviction that they exist for a reason.

THE GUINNESS

It is widely known that Guinness is a demi-god in Ireland. All the Guinness consumed in this country, the UK and the US is brewed at St. James's Gate Brewery, which is a twenty minutes' walk from Temple Bar. Having a Guinness on your visit here is compulsory, and even I had a sip once (when I visited the Guinness factory with work, because a free pint was included in the ticket price). Marketing efforts to set this brand apart have gone as far as dictating a particular method of pouring a pint of Guinness, which the Irish take very seriously. Eventually, this would turn me into a Guinness snob in other parts of the world, whenever I saw it being poured all the way to the brim in one go (and I didn't even drink it!). A perfectly poured pint of the black stuff will have a 2cm, smooth, bubble-free head, which is the result of a two-part pour, so when you’re placing a drink order you better start with the Guinness (as a bunch of irritable bartenders made sure I learned in the early days), because it takes an extra minute to be ready. Also, anyone who was happy accepting a poorly poured pint of Guinness (at least in Ireland) was for sure anything but Irish.

SAINT PATRICK’S DAY

Everyone but the Irish, that’s who floods the streets of Temple Bar on Paddy’s Day, on the 17th of March, when the city is at full capacity and the already steep prices go soaring. 

On the days coming up to my first Paddy’s Day, the older members of staff who had seen it come and go several times on the job, started counted the days. When I asked what all the fuss was about, one of them rubbed his face with both his hands and smiled a strained smile, because I didn’t know what I was in for, and because he knew what he himself was in for. Bartenders would work shifts as long as eighteen hours on any regular week.

My first Paddy’s Day was the most memorable, because I had never seen so many people converging in a place in such a way that they actually clogged streets. It was like a green tidal human wave that washed over the city and drank the bars dry in one day. Temple Bar opened its doors at eleven that morning and, when the shutter went up, the people who had been waiting and chanting outside the door rushed in excitedly. The place was packed within minutes, overflowing with green hats and overly enthusiastic tourists, all of them eager to pay a small fortune for next day’s hangover. 

Like every year on this day, all members of staff were on, the whole bar was cleared of tables and stools, no food was served, and there was no live music: there was literally no room for anything other than binge drinking. In this state of things it was practically impossible for the staff to leave the premises during breaks, so the free space that was left on the kitchen, where dozens and dozens of bar stools had been crammed, was turned into a sort of bunker where we kept  food supplies for the day.

It wasn't a day to be slacking, and when the last drinkers staggered out and the doors finally closed behind them, we still had to bring the bar back to normal. This included removing a particularly thick and sticky layer of dirt from the extent of the bar’s surface and carrying every last wooden stool and sturdy table of the bar back up two flights of stairs from the kitchen. Officially, the bar could accomodate 600 patrons at a time on a regular day, so you do the maths. We were six on the floor that night and short staffed for the task. By the time we finished scrubbing the floor, an hour later than usual, the bartenders, whose jurisdiction was behind the bar, had already finished doing their share and now sat at the main bar, all five or six of them, slouching in front of freshly poured pints of beer with their back to us. Not one of them volunteered to help while we trudged up and down the stairs carrying stools and tables.

Carrying dozens of stools against my hip gave me a bruise on my side and a limp arm for a day or two afterwards, not to mention how unimpressed I was by the lack of team spirit and solidarity that had caused them. I was so overworked and felt so disappointed that when I woke up the next day, I was still up in arms over what had happened and, by the time I got to work in the afternoon, I couldn't hold it in. I had been working in the bar for ten months now and that day I was the one doing the scolding (instead of taking any yelling myself, as I used to do before) - not that they listened… bartenders just looked at me in unconcealed amusement while I ranted, and then shrugged it off when I was safely out of sight. The queen of the minions saw I needed to let off some steam  and was sensible enough to send me for a walk in the middle of my shift. I had been in Ireland for nearly a year, but clearly  hadn’t yet picked up on certain cultural cues to manage expectations, and some time later, when the subject came up again, a baffled bartender said to me:

If you needed help, why didn't you just ask?!

 

St. Patrick's Day 2016.
My last Paddy's Day shift was much smoother, but I still didn't look any better at the end of it,
 and this was my most decent angle when I got back home that night.

St Patrick's Day at The Temple Bar.

THE END

By the time I handed in my notice, three odd years after my first day, the job had taken me well out of my comfort zone and in doing so had taught me things that went beyond waitressing and beer types. I had also befriended the queen of the minions who turned out to be a great person and one of the best friends I made in Ireland. 

That evening, after she had sent me for a walk and as I strode along the river Liffey trying to calm myself, I considered quitting. It was the first time I thought about it, but it wouldn’t be the last. Once, I even sent out CVs, but I never did quit until I had to leave Ireland, over two years later. It is true that at times I quite disliked the job, but I rarely woke up not feeling like going into work. 

Looking back on it, I think it was because Temple Bar came to symbolise my life in Ireland: never an uneventful day, always bustling with activity; always a place that kept you on your toes, where you'd meet all sorts of people all the time, from crazy randoms to good friends and absolutely everything in between; where you had more to drink than was wise but kept accepting rounds no matter what, as it was the polite thing to do; where there was always something to laugh at, someone to laugh with; a place in which -after a while you realised- you'd stayed longer than you intended, perhaps even longer than was sensible but even then you stayed on because, what the heck, you were having fun.

One night at closing time after a long Saturday shift, I was resting against one of the barrel-tables I had brought in from the pavement, when one of the senior bartenders waddled over saying Victoria's always smiling, aren't ya? He was on his way to lock the doors and the bunch of keys in his hand clinked when he stopped, patted me on the shoulder and added: I say you'll be smiling the day you die.