Jeffrey Morgenthaler » Ten Myths You’ve Probably Heard in Bars
When I got my first job bartending at a tender young age, I had visions of Tom Cruise in the movie Cocktail: hotel room keys sliding across the bar as I coolly sipped a spiked coffee, standing with one foot on the brass rail and gazing across the emptying room at the end of a long night while I decided which young vixen to go home with. The real truth hits me every other Friday night, as I lie on my stomach in an inch of standing water, trying to fish a whole lime out of my floor drain with a steak knife in a vain attempt to keep the entire bar from flooding. The truth of the matter is, bartending is a job like any other, but with eight more hours of standing and a wild pack of drunks to tend to every night. At the end of that night, there’s an hour’s worth of cleanup to do, and the sad truth is that by the time most of us are done, most people are sound asleep.