Tips from the Boylan bar: Progressive edition
Don’t write ‘sit on my face’ in lieu of a tip
Another week of serving little monsters (and I don’t mean that as a Lady Gaga-esque term of endearment), another week of helpful tips to make sure you’re not the most hated person at the bar.
I want to first thank all of the full-fledged adults out there – you know who you are. The adults who own credit cards not attached to their parents’ bank accounts and more importantly who tip or at least show some modicum of decorum or respect when ordering a drink: thanks for existing!
Shout out to Darden for being the beautiful type of human who knows they’ll be rich one day so they tip big today – you are what is known in the vernacular as “the Real MVP.”
On the subject of tipping, I have a few questions. If you are using an American Express or MasterCard set up through your parents’ bank account, and you are at a bar ordering $11 Long Island Iced Teas and $14 Irish Trash Cans, why do you not tip?
Would your parents really protest an extra buck thrown in, especially when that buck is the thing that keeps you from being a douchebag? To misquote Harry S. Truman, “The buck does not stop here. Tip your bartenders and your servers.”
If, however, you are on a budget, and tipping is just out of the question, there are ways to not leave a tip and not be a dick about it. A simple dash through the tip line does the trick, as does writing “0.”
What doesn’t work is writing “sit on my face” in lieu of a tip.
While that is a tempting offer, there are a number of ways you can expect to be rejected (and then promptly ejected from the bar).
I respect myself, and I respect my job, however little it means to you. It is one thing to disrespect the service I am providing you by not tipping; it is another thing all together to disrespect me by writing something so lewd and so not funny. If you’re going to make a joke, at least make it funny.
This, of course, happened Tuesday – a night colloquially known as a progressive, where drinks are stupidly cheap and increase only incrementally throughout the night.
This meant for my other bartender, as well as myself, a night of humans getting progressively more and more drunk as the night went on. It also meant that as soon as drinks reached normal pricing, there was a mass exodus out of the bar to God-knows-where.
So, the bar is closed. We’re counting the money, cleaning the bottles and coolers and bar top, when an inebriated over-sized child comes stumbling into the bar. With an unfounded amount of confidence, he walks over to the bar, sits down, and places his hand on top of the stack of twenty-dollar bills I had counted.
The only thing I’m thinking is surely this kid knows someone working right now and is just waiting and passing the time by counting the money, too, because no one would just drunkenly walk into a bar and go straight for the money, right?
Apparently everyone else, including the bouncers, were thinking the same thing because there was this moment of stillness where we all looked at one another, like, “Alright, who’s gonna claim this asshole?”
It was about when he started to grab the money when we all realized that no one knew him, and collectively, jumped on him. I swatted his hand away from the money, told him to get up and leave; the bouncer came over and grabbed him from the chair; the other bartender came around to get him out, too.
All the while, this kid is acting like white male privilege incarnate. At every touch of the bouncers leading him out, he just shrieked, “Ow! Ow! Stop, seriously, get off me!”
This includes when I swatted his hand away, at which point he yelped, and then called me a cunt. Which is incredible, really. He’s the one who tries to steal our money, yet I am the cunt. If there were ever a time to pull out my phone and just tweet #ThePatriarchy over and over again, that would have been it.
But, c’est la vie. La crazy, alcohol-fueled vie.
Check back next week for a recap of Halloween Weekend. I think Boylan is dressing up as the Krusty Krab, in which case I’ll most likely be Pearl, the hormonal teenage Whale.