The Wild Card..

"There isn't enough alcohol in this"

"What's the cheapest thing you have?"

"Are there free refills?"

These glorious words are something you never want to hear spoken from potenial customers if you work in the food and beverage industry. You might as well take out your wallet, let me examine the cob webs that line the leather rather than cold hard cash, and ask for a cold glass of free water.

Up until recently these were the only things I would hear while working behind a bar in New Haven. Demanding over privelaged brats; leaving me the change from their $4.25 corona.

Look, I know you have a hundred thousand dollar education, and your parents bought you that brand new M5 that you've been showing off to your friends named Brock and Trent, but us peasants behind the bar- who drive a geo prizm and reside across the street from a halfway house, need to keep their electricty on. So, reach back into that new Marc Jacobs wallet of yours, and quietly thank mommy and daddy for supplying you with an account to support your blatant alcoholism.

I'm not trying to pass judgement on these pretentious, un-unique children of privelage, but don't come up to me in a bar on a Friday night- wearing a white jean blazer, and the first words that escape your freshly carmex-ed lips are "what college do you go to? I go to Yale, obviously". What's even more pathetic is that you think you're getting somewhere with comments like this. That picking up women is effortless enough for you because you are a man who continues to buy his way to the top.

If you offered to buy me a drink, in addition to that pompous statement, I'd probably entertain your dullness for longer than an instant. Who knows, that could have been the Friday night that my judgements went beyond compromisable and I'd let you buy my second drink.

Well, I just went way off topic there; back to important matters. For nearly two years I worked at a "brewery" (I use quotations around the word brewery because this Connecticut based, chain restaurant brewed its' own malty substance which consistently embodied the same bland and unremarkable taste- feet). The bar was directly in the center of about four colleges, ergo- we were a college bar, ergo- $350 remained in my checking account.

On a nightly basis, tipsy 21 year old college girls would saunter in, order shots of SoCo and lime and be exasperated at not only the price, but that there wasn't some devistatingly handsome juice pumped dude behind the bar telling them "it was on the house".

Here is something that I am more than certain your parents didn't teach you while growing up in Red Bank, New Jersey; tipping, although still technically not a requirement among patrons of the service industry is always expected. If you have the audacity to ask how expensive something is, you better be able to back it up with 20% or more. I'm not demanding and I am certainly not unrealistic. I understand our country has been experiencing an economic recession and financial trouble, but people will always have money to drink. The more unhappy you are, the more time you are going to spend at your local watering hole. So, Jenny, Britney, Courtney, whatever your name is, next time you decide to grace one of us less fortunates with your presence, make sure you have enough on your debit card to take care of me the way I have continuously taken care of you.

<3 you.