Thursday, January 15, 2009
I was rightfully duped. I was scrambling for a second job (the 12-hour-a-week campus job wasn’t cutting it) and the bills needed to be paid. In a lapse of judgement or maybe out of innocent curiosity, I called the “BARTENDING. UP TO $300 A DAY. NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY. TRAINING PROVIDED.” ad in a newspaper’s classifieds.
I’d skipped over the ad a hundred times before, but this time it was too perfect to pass up. $300 a day? Score. No experience? Right down my alley. Training provided? Easy cheesy. Upon reaching a party on the other line, a gruff-sounding man clicked on and I knew it really was too good to be true.
Turns out, all the training was from home with a convenient kit they mail you. When he started explaining how simple it was to pass the final test with a mere 70 percent, I gave him the click.
I’d known that bartenders around Lawrence worked their way up from table washing and clearing jobs when everyone lumbered out of the bar, but I figured maybe I could work my way in via an 800 number.
Bartending, though, as I learned in Brianne’s bartending story on page 10, is more than a perfect pour. It takes a certain kind of person to handle intoxicated strangers.
I don’t think I could take cleaning up an inebriated stranger’s vomit, breaking up a fight between two drunk parties who don’t even remember what they were fighting about, or socializing in an attempt to get a bigger tip as part of my job description.
A mysterious atmosphere surrounds most bartenders of the bars I frequent. I never know how friendly I need to be to get the best drink, or if a tip even really matters. I sometimes want to take my $2 tip from my $3 drink and wave it in front of their face just to make sure they know to liquor me up upon my refill.
I did end up finding another part-time job that semester: yard work for two hours once a week at about 23 dollars a pop. It was no $300, but I got a nice tan out of it. And yes, the job was from the classifieds, no training required.
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