What it’s like working behind the bar at the LCR

Your ability to down VKs does not impress me


It’s a Saturday and you’re the only one not looking forward to the LCR.

You’re at home, the music is turned up, everyone’s singing, drinking and dressed to impressed. Except you. You’re wearing a purple T-shirt and are stone cold sober because when all of your friends leave to go and party at the LCR, you head off to spend the night behind the bar serving their drinks.

This is the worst thing about working the LCR. The jealousy you feel when all your friends have loads of fun and get really drunk and you know you have to stay sober. It means predrinks just aren’t fun anymore.

Trying to have fun while sober

But it’s not actually that bad once you get there. You’re probably too drunk to notice but the bar staff are always having a good time too. Just because we’re on the other side of the bar doesn’t mean we can’t have a rave, too, and most of us are singing along and dancing just as much as our customers.

Drunk customers, though, can often ruin our nights. I promise we are serving you as quickly as we can and it’s not our fault when the person in the front of you has a moral dilemma of what drink to order or forgets their pin. Blame them for the hold up, not us.

And girls, I would just like to tell you that the female bar staff don’t all hate you. Despite what we hear you saying about us, how we always serve boys first and leave you until last, it’s simply not true. We are far too busy to be selective with who we serve and just go to whoever we see first when we look up from the till.

Do you really think we have time to look at all the boys in the queue, work out who’s the fittest and make sure we serve him first? If a boy gets served before you it’s probably for the more obvious reason that they were in front of you in the queue.

Honestly

The funny thing about working behind the bar is realising how many friends you have. The amount of people who are like: “Oh hey, serve me next, we’re friends!” and you look at them and realise it’s that person who was in a seminar with you in first term of first year who you’ve not spoken to since.

It’s not going to work. Unless we are genuinely best friends, I am not going to serve you before anyone else.

And then there are the “lads” who show off. They order three VKs, all different colours, and look you in the eye while they show you their impressive trick of putting a straw in each one and drinking them at the same time very quickly.

I have no problem with you doing this – you’re trying to have a good time, I get that. But could you please do it away from the bar? The problem is that despite your self-confidence, none of you are very good at this game. Instead of impressing me with your strawpedo abilities, most of the time you end up choking and spitting a mixture of flavours of VK all over my face and hair. Not even slightly impressive.

Hair full of VK and too tired to clean

So it’s 2:30 am. You’ve had a sing, found someone to do inappropriate sexual dancing with all night and you are having one final sway to the last club banger before you stumble home and fall into bed.

This is when the work really starts for the bar staff.

The shutters go down and we grab buckets of soapy water to clean all surfaces drowned in Jager until every bit of stick has gone. We wash up and take the bins and the bottles out. Cinderella had it easy.

Then it’s time to face the other side of the bar. We grab brooms and buckets and start the daunting job of cleaning up all your mess, most of which consists of half–full VK bottles on on every possible surface.

But sometimes you leave us lovely surprises like cups full of sick – someone once even found a used tampon on the floor. It’s our job to clean this up, so, thanks. As well as this, we also have to put all of the furniture in blue bar and in Unio back to its usual places. So while you’re passed out in bed, try to remember we’re still dragging tables around.

We have to collect buckets of your leftover drinks and any other liquids you leave behind

When our shifts have finished, it’s usually gone 3:30 and by the time our taxis turn up and we get home it’s past 4:00. Then we are faced with our drunk friends who won’t let us go to bed because they want to tell us how great the LCR was tonight and think we’re boring for not wanting to join in the after party.

When we finally crawl into bed, smelling of beer and aching from all the running about, we’re just thankful that it’s all over. Until next week.