So last night was another interesting night in the nightclub I work in. I was expecting a nice, relatively quiet and easy shift so naturally that didn’t happen. Apparently some fancy football game had been going on all day so all the football hooligans had come out to play.

For all of you considering work in a bar. Don’t.

It must have been around twelve when the fun began…

I’d just finished collecting all the empty glasses I could see in the bar I was posted to, so I wandered into my bf’s bar to check how he was doing. As I reached the bar, I was greeted by the flood that rocked England’s farming areas in 2015 and no boyfriend. Clearly he had been washed away by the deluge. Blinking furiously, I dive for the “twisty bit” (technical term) on the front of the dishwasher that manually drains the water from inside it in the hopes it’ll stop leaking and slam a large jug under it to catch the excess. It filled up rapidly. I grabbed another and swapped it out to pour into the nearby sink. Keep in mind this is in full view of a crowd of drunk football hooligans, but I am far too SWAMPED to care.

In order to drain the machine I have to kneel in the puddle of dishwater, luckily I was wearing tights – and to be honest, you get so soaked in alcohol working behind a bar, water is hardly an issue – and at this point I didn’t care. The area manager came over, called by one of the bar-girls on the radio,  and he swapped out the jugs to help me reach up. (I’m short, lol.)

He said to me.

“Is it draining? Has it slowed down?”

I told him no because I think it’s still in a cycle.

“It’s not on a cycle… have you tried telling the machine to drain?”

I had not. I turned the machine to drain, and although slowly, the spuming torrent of Niagara Falls trickled away to a slow river, and finally slowed.

“Turn it off for a few minutes.” The manager told me, just as my boyfriend was returning. Turning off the machine at the wall, he asked me if I had a knife. Naturally I didn’t, so I said no, but I headed upstairs to grab one. Why? I didn’t know.

So I grabbed the knife for cutting limes and lemons from the top bar and headed back down, through a busy nightclub, brandishing a knife. I’m not sure what bothered me the most; the fact I was WADDLING AROUND WITH A KNIFE IN MY HANDS IN A CROWDED NIGHTCLUB, or the fact that the doorman and nightclubbers neither seemed to care, nor even notice that I HAD A LARGE SERRATED KNIFE IN MY HAND. Ah, the trustworthy doormen we have.

Once back at the dishwasher from Hell the knife was plucked away by a boyfriend who proceeded to jam it into the wall socket. Clearly the stress had become too much for him. Instead of trying to help him kill myself, I feigned ignorance and wandered off to the bar I was supposed to be at, gathering glasses as I went. I was greeted at the bar by a rather irate young girl who claimed in words to the effect of;

“Some lassie in the loos just kicked me in the fanny.”

I had to take a few seconds to process this as, although in America “Fanny” means “Butt”. In Scotland, it does not. As I was trying to make sure if I heard this right, one of the other bartenders had leaned forward to hear.

“-And I wanted to make sure I didn’t go fucking raj at her. I came right here, how dare she-”

So the bartender headed off to find a doorman, and I did my best to make sure the girl did not “go fucking raj” at anyone. Though at this point, a good fight would have been very stress relieving to watch. We headed over to the loos in wait for the butt-booter and the large male doorman stood at the doorway in wait.

(I was oddly reminded of last week when there was a barricade of girls huddled around some poor girl who’d had her skirt ripped off and had to be escorted out the loos by the manager…)

Naturally, when the girl came out, they almost started fighting. Remember that the kickee was an ex-employee, I quickly tried to grab her and pull her back to avoid a fight, only to have one of the bargirls barge passed with her arms wide crying out

“For fuck’s sake!”

Which was hysterical for two reasons.

The girl who did it had, not three weeks ago kicked a guy lying on the bar floor because he was “in her way”.
She is mad as a bee in a tumble-dryer
She generally doesn’t give a damn.
The kicker and her bag went flying.

This completely defused the situation and the doormen dragged the numpties out, leaving the assaulted ex-employee to her dancing, and I decided to go extricate my boyfriend off the electrical wires in the socket.

Apparently, the socket doesn’t switch back on easily and that’s the only way to get it back on again after a manual reboot aka “turning it off and on again”.

So, yes, all in all, I wanted a nice quiet night. Thanks for that, fate. That was… something.

Ironically enough, the only people who didn’t give me bother last night were the football hooligans. Go figure!