Bartending Isn't A Real Job

Let me foreward this by saying that not all bartenders are incapable of doing real work.  But a good 80% of them in fact, are completely worthless.  Hear me out.

Say you walk into a bar to meet up with some friends for a bit.  You go up to the bar to order a drink.  Then you proceed to wait for an extrordinary amount of time.  There are two bartenders behind the bar, and perhaps 8 people currently at the bar.  Only one of the patrons at the bar is waiting for a drink.  During your wait, 2 more people walk up to the bar and get served before you do, despite the fact that you are making eye contact and practically leaning over the bar to be as noticeable as possible.  You may even have money prominently displayed in your grip, as though it wasn't already painfully obvious that you are looking to be served.  Such is the price you pay for deciding to come drink in a bar rather than do something more meaningful with your evening.

It's bad enough that I'm paying a 300 to 400% markup per beer, and paying another dollar on top of it, all for the privilege of slowly being served a domestic beer I could have bought at the corner store 2 blocks away.  I love bringing beers into bars and getting the confused reaction from servers when they realize you are drinking something they don't serve, and not knowing whether they can do anything about it or not.  Now that I actually managed to get your attention, go grab me another beer, and make it snappy, Skippy.

There is an establishment near me, we'll call it Flake's, where most of the bartenders I've ever had to deal with are worthless.  One time I was waiting at the bar with an empty pitcher to refill, and there were 3 bartenders standing right there.  One was trying to figure out how to use the register, and the second and third were watching on.  It's a shame when it takes 3 geniuses to work a register.  But then again, you don't exactly need your GED to become a bartender.  Just have tattoos, dress scantily,  and push your boobs up real nice-like.  I had to wait for what must have been close to 5 minutes.  You should have a little more hustle in your step to be making the $2 I was going to tip you on a pitcher, when the work entails something as simple at pulling a handle down.  Something I could literally teach a retarded Rhesus monkey to do.

There is this other venue I used to frequent, we'll call it Whack's NightChub.  There was this girl on duty once who would take a dollar out of your payment without telling you as a gratuity.  I'm pretty sure that this is not a legal maneuver to pull, but she's a bartender, not a lawyer, so what could I possibly expect?  I'd ask for my beer that only required her to open a fridge, pop a top, and hand it to me, then pay her.  Upon receiving my cash back, I'd drop a dollar, and she'd tell me to keep it because she already took the tip out.  The next time I would come to the bar, the same process would happen again.  She was doing it every time.  She wasn't raking in the cash at the unrealistic rate she thought she should be, so she took matters into her own hands.  How noble. 

I love listening to bartenders bitch about not getting tips.  Your job is like a 2 out of 10 on the easy scale and you are already making a more than decent wage for what your job entails, with the bulk coming from tips.  I just watched you rake in 3 or 4 dollars while I was waiting for my drink.  I can do some simple math and realize that despite all your bitching and moaning, you are going to walk out of your "job" with a nice amount of money in your pocket that night.  Yet it still isn't enough for you.  Some bartenders have such a huge sense of entitlement.

Being a bartender has always been similar to being a stripper in my eyes.  Both are jobs you take on in order to pay your way through school, or make a little extra money on the side.  Both are jobs you get, all the while not expecting to do them for a substantial amount of your life.  Both are jobs where faking interest and friendship in customers is a means to making more money at the end of the night.  Neither has much of a future as you get older and your looks fade.  The exception being if you are a bartender with more charisma than being a bartender necessitates, who also has management skills and a mental dictionary of every drink imaginable.  In which case, you could work at an upscale place where looks and image aren't the key factor in new hires.

A lot of these bartenders wouldn't last a week in a job that requires real labor.  Try working in landscaping or any other manual labor job for a while and bringing home perhaps 2 to 3 dollars an hour more than the base rate for bartending.  No tips to be had, just the base rate.  In a job that requires quite a bit more than walking the length of a bar, popping bottle caps and occasionally having to make a mixed drink.  A job that actually wears and tears on your body.  Slowly ruining your body over the years for a wage lower than the one you constantly bitch about now.  So be thankful that you live in a country where you can do so little for so much, and bring me another beer so I can drown out my own miserable existence.  Here's a dollar.  You earned it.

Get out your wallet and bend over.



Disney Is Horseshit

When I say Disney is horseshit, I'm referring to Disney circa 2000 to present.  Prior to that, the powers that be at Disney appear to have still had integrity.  Though most of Disney's 90's output seems like it was fairly hit and miss as well.  But I guess it's easy to be so hit and miss when you're churning out a record number of releases to maximize your bottom line.

The sheer number of sequels Disney craps out these days is remarkable.  If you take a gander at the "Future Releases" list on wikipedia, you'll notice that no less that a dozen of the planned movies are sequels to existing franchises.  Disney jumped ship on the artistic front the second they started doing sequels to Bambi and The Jungle Book.  I would imagine though, that it is much easier to do a sequel to a movie that has already been established at a hit, rather than to put in the creative work to come up with a completely fresh concept.

Anything remotely creative in the last 15 years of Disney's filmography has been done by Pixar.  The Toy Story franchise, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E are among the eleven animated films Pixar has released, all eleven having been comercially successful.  Pixar is actually quite reminiscent of Disney during it's heyday when Walt Disney still ran things, before it turned into a conglomerate focused on world domination.  No wonder Disney stepped in a snatched up Pixar once they saw the monetary possibilities.

If there is any question as to what Disney is all about these days, just take a look at how they go about releasing their products.  They constantly rerelease their older established movies in limited editions, only to rerelease them again 5 years later in a new edition.  This might make sense for the less popular Disney movies, but for the "classics" it is just a means of capitalizing on supply and demand.  A movie like Cinderella or Pinocchio will always sell, so there is no reason to ever take them out of print.  If you have something in print for a year, announce it as a limited time product, then take it off the market for 5 years, only to rerelease it in a new version afterwards, you are a jerk.  But more importantly, you are taking advantage of the Disney faithful who will buy these movies again when you rerelease them and tag on "Magical Edition" after the title.  Pinocchio thus far has been released 4 separate times on VHS, 3 times on DVD, and one time so far on Blu-Ray.  Is that really necessary?  It is if your company is creatively bankrupt.  Alright.  I'm done here.

Larry The Cable Guy Is Hilarious

Yes.  Larry The Cable Guy is hilarious.  He makes jokes about such things as: flea markets, NASCAR, the mentally handicapped, strip clubs, and getting things accomplished.  How could you not find that funny?  And how could you not find this funny:

"I was reading the paper the other day because my neighbor got up late."

Or how about this gem:

"A friend of mine went fishing and caught a rainbow trout, but he threw it back 'cause he said he didn't want a gay fish."

Zing!  How about one more?

"I dated this retarded woman once but we broke up, we couldn't agree on anything. I'd say 'tomato', she'd say 'bowling shoes'!"

He's like the Andrew Dice Clay of the redneck set.  Both are incredibly successful comedians who rarely come up with good material, and have acts based around over-the-top characters.  Not that I have a problem with character comedians.  There are countless comedians who are/were successful with acts based on delivering a character.  Bobcat Goldthrait and Gilbert Gottfried come to mind.  As a character comedian, "Larry" isn't that bad.  He is even dedicated enough to the character to rock a farmer's tan and keep up his fighting (over)weight.

The real reason I find Larry The Cable Guy hilarious though, is that he's a college educated guy who's act is to be a marginally-educated redneck stereotype, who appeals largely to people who fit the marginally-educated redneck stereotype.  All you need to do is bring up his videos on youtube and check out the highest-rated comments.  4 out of 5 times, the most "thumbed up" comments are the ignorant, grammatically incompetent  abortions left by individuals who aren't in on "the joke".  Comments like: "I hate political correctness because it makes me a racist for telling the truth".  Or... you being a racist makes you a racist, maybe?

I'm sure Dan Whitney, who plays Larry, is actually an intelligent, open-minded guy.  At very least, he's a great business man.  The problem is, a great deal of his fans aren't aware of this and use his popularity to justify bigotry.  They don't realize that they are championing someone who is striking it rich by performing a blatant caracature of they themselves, and I find that endlessly entertaining.  This would kind of be like me getting into blackface and telling watermelon jokes to a predominantly black crowd and having them laud me for it instead of being offended and booing me off the stage.  Except in Dan's case he is of the same race as the crowd, only in a different social class.  So maybe the blackface isn't really a valid example.  You get the point though.  The point is: he is terrible, but got rich off of being terrible, and that is America.

GIT-R-DERRRRR!

Yet Another Internet Blog... Lovely.

I now have a blog.  So do 125 million other people according to my hastily researched data, compliments of google search (tm).  This gives me great hope that my blog will not only be seen by my mom and 3 friends, but also 2 or 3 random people who type "vestigial" into google search (tm).  I'd like to thank google search (tm) in advance for this collateral traffic.

I used to "blog" on myspace back in the day before myspace became atrocious.  But then myspace became atrocious.  At that point I didn't "blog" anymore.  I think I had around 150 posts on there.  87% of them were crap if I remember correctly.  43% were written and posted hastily whilst I was drunk.

Shortly afterwards, I decided to start doing youtube videos for the material I would come up with.  But as it turns out, producing a finished video, after dealing with the camera, lighting, editing, compression, uploading, etcetera, is a lot more work than just the writing part alone.  The payoff always tended to be horribly illiterate 15-year-olds trolling my videos due to the fact that they weren't capable of interpreting sarcasm and satire.  Way to help foster an intellectual environment youtube.  Though I'm sure the excellect education system plays a part in that somewhere.

I will still make videos from time to time, but I'll stick to stuff that would be better expressed in a filmed medium rather than in written format.  Maybe I'll even post something here and then condense the general idea down into a video format.  Who knows...  Maybe I'll abandon both this blog and the videos and decide to be an organic Ramen farmer in Florida.  The sky is the limit.  I took and failed calculus a few times back in college and still have no idea exactly what the hell a limit is or does.  I should have just written "sky" as the answer for all the limit questions.  I'm sure that would have resulted in my passing that class eventually.

Fin