The last two days.
Dec. 11th, 2004 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasWell, last night, I'd HOPED to go to the Lord Chancelor's housewarming -- Lyman, who played the LC in Iolanthe, just got a new place, and had a party to celebrate. I'd really wanted to see everyone in that crowd, and had hoped that I'd get out of work early enough to make it feasable. I haven't done any socializing since, well, the cast party, actually.
I think that the Harvard Club of Boston, which is, after all, a relatively staid, one might even say "stuffy" members-only social club -- it's a country club, except that it's in a city -- really should think twice before hosting frat parties.
The function last night was the Tri-House Winter Formal Dance. Okay, technically, it's not a frat party if the people hosting it aren't actually fraternities -- they're residence houses. Totally different thing, apparently. Someone who went to Harvard could explain it to me, if you felt like it, but I frankly don't care much.
All I can say is, if a significant percentage of the people are being held upright by their friends because they're too drunk to stand on the way INTO the party, we, as a club, are basically (and here I will use a technical bartending term) fucked.
We set up the bars at 8:30 PM or so. Nobody showed up until 9:30 or 10 -- but I guess that they'd all started drinking at six or seven PM. There's not much we can do to prevent people from getting drunk when they were like that when we got 'em.
Other than that, many of the other bartenders suspected that much of the crowd was on X, but I don't know about that. The amound of fondling and tactile gropng that I saw was pretty much what I remember from parties when I was that age, and there were no drugs at those parties.
To be honest, it was less tactile than most parties I go to these days. Maybe I just run with a particularly tactile crowd. But everyone else assumed it must be drugs.
Maybe someone who knows the folks I hang out with and has taken X can tell me: it seems like, from what people were telling me, the effect of X is to make people kind of more like my friends are naturally.
If that's really the effect of the drug, I can't really see what the harm in it is, although I can see why Republican administrations would be threatened. But that's all a digression. The POINT is the fact that people were puking, and passing out, and someone was taken to the hospital, and they closed all the bars down early, but I still was there until one in the morning.
And I got to say, it would probably have been a good idea had the people handing out the wristbands that said you were over 21 had any sort of training in detecting fake IDs. Sure, there are a lot of people from New York, but you'd expect that SOMEONE in the crowd would have had a driver's license from SOME other state. (NY IDs are among the easiest to fake.)
Also -- let's say that you are setting up a function. And you get a roll of 550 tickets that you're going to use as free drink tickets. And you're expecting between 400 and 600 people to show up.
How many drink tickets would you give out per person?
That's right! Two drink tickets per person! And then, when you run out of free drink tickets halfway through the night because you've told everyone that they get two free drinks with their admission, and you've given out all your free drink tickets, you (being the person setting up the event, which is to say, NOT an employee of the Harvard Club), should tell people to go over to the cashiers (who ARE working for the Harvard Club), and tell the cashiers to give you free tickets.
I was one of the cashiers. My job was to make sure that I didn't give out any tickets without putting the appropriate amount of money into the box. This whole "We were told that you'd give us free tickets" didn't work on ANY of the cashiers, actually.
Apparently, last year,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
merkcomet was one of the cashiers at this function. Someone offered him oral sex for free tickets. He turned her down, for a number of reasons, including, 1. marquessadea, 2. damnit, that's just gross, and 3. if someone considers their blowjobs to be worth only $6, that's probably not a blowjob you want, anyway.
Even though I know Harvard students who I like and love, I have to say that, in the general case, I hate Harvard students. I think my rule is that all Harvard students who are NOT members of HRSFA suck.
I got out at one AM, totally fried, and I forgot to even look up what Lyman's address was, so I missed the party. I resent work for making me miss the party. I resent drunk Harvard students for making me miss the party. I resent Ron Allen, who's my temporary boss, since the COMPETENT beverage manager, John Rohanna, quit, because Ron Allen is a third-rate moron. Okay, truthfully, many of the things which went wrong last night were not his fault, but they were things that a competent manager could have predicted and headed off. And his handling of crisis situations is generally so ham-handed and stupid that he makes things worse. Also, he panics easily whenever anything even slightly UNUSUAL happens, so in situations where you actually NEED leadership, he's totally useless.
Today was better. Today was the children's Christmas party. Obviously, we were serving all non-alcoholic drinks. Except for me. I also was serving grown-up eggnog, besides the non-alcoholic kind.
In the past, I've been very clear about how, in bartending, you NEVER drink on the job (even your own stuff), and you NEVER drink the bar's booze (even on your own time.) And that drinking booze on the job is clearly a firing offense right away.
See, there's one exception to that.
Eggnog.
I mean, this dates back to the middle ages at least. At the Christmas season, things get just a little bit more relaxed, and have for centuries. The practical upshot of this is that, if you've got spiked eggnog, and there's enough for all the members, well, it's not a problem to have a glass or two of it. . .
And let me just say how much difference a little bit of Meyer's dark rum makes to a carton of pre-made Hood Golden Eggnog. (For non-Bostonians -- Hood is one of the two major dairies that serves the Boston area (the other being Garelick, and there are a number of minor dairies as wel). One of their seasonal products is cartons of eggnog.) I mean, I like Hood eggnog just fine, but it's not as good as the stuff I make myself. But add just a bit of dark rum, and -- yeah. That's the stuff.
Let me tell you. A glass of eggnog or two, Ron NOT working the function, and dealing with three-through-twelve year olds, instead of drunk, high, AND stoned college students -- that makes all the difference in the world.
I did make one suggestion to the people holding the Christmas party. One thing they did was that every kid who showed up brought a toy for Toys for Tots, which I think is an excellent idea. But then they set up a display table for some of the toys.
The kids there ranged in age from, as I said, as young as maybe three to as old as maybe twelve. With perhaps a median of eight.
I flatter myself that I'm starting to get a little bit of a handle on eight-year-olds. And what I think is that it's cruel to put out a display of toys that kids are giving away. I think that they can understand giving, and sacrifice, and those sorts of concepts BRIEFLY -- when they're actually PUTTING the toys in a bin to be given away. But then, to have them there to LOOK at all afternoon, to SEE what you aren't getting because you've given it . . . I think that a lot of the younger-than-eight kids developed "giver's remorse." They WANTED the things that were displayed so attractively, and began to resent having given them.
I pointed this out to the folks running it, suggesting that they might want to keep the bin to put the toys in, but not do the display table for party tomorrow.
"Well, it's good for these kids to learn that they can't always get what they want."
I smiled, and said that, the problem was that these kids just didn't have the brain structures yet to fully get that. They understood that LOGICALLY those toys weren't for them, but not EMOTIONALLY, and that disconnect was causing stress for them.
I don't think they understood what I was saying.
I hope they follow my advice anyway. I saw two temper tantrums which I believe, judging by body language, to have come from precisely that stress.
I think that the Harvard Club of Boston, which is, after all, a relatively staid, one might even say "stuffy" members-only social club -- it's a country club, except that it's in a city -- really should think twice before hosting frat parties.
The function last night was the Tri-House Winter Formal Dance. Okay, technically, it's not a frat party if the people hosting it aren't actually fraternities -- they're residence houses. Totally different thing, apparently. Someone who went to Harvard could explain it to me, if you felt like it, but I frankly don't care much.
All I can say is, if a significant percentage of the people are being held upright by their friends because they're too drunk to stand on the way INTO the party, we, as a club, are basically (and here I will use a technical bartending term) fucked.
We set up the bars at 8:30 PM or so. Nobody showed up until 9:30 or 10 -- but I guess that they'd all started drinking at six or seven PM. There's not much we can do to prevent people from getting drunk when they were like that when we got 'em.
Other than that, many of the other bartenders suspected that much of the crowd was on X, but I don't know about that. The amound of fondling and tactile gropng that I saw was pretty much what I remember from parties when I was that age, and there were no drugs at those parties.
To be honest, it was less tactile than most parties I go to these days. Maybe I just run with a particularly tactile crowd. But everyone else assumed it must be drugs.
Maybe someone who knows the folks I hang out with and has taken X can tell me: it seems like, from what people were telling me, the effect of X is to make people kind of more like my friends are naturally.
If that's really the effect of the drug, I can't really see what the harm in it is, although I can see why Republican administrations would be threatened. But that's all a digression. The POINT is the fact that people were puking, and passing out, and someone was taken to the hospital, and they closed all the bars down early, but I still was there until one in the morning.
And I got to say, it would probably have been a good idea had the people handing out the wristbands that said you were over 21 had any sort of training in detecting fake IDs. Sure, there are a lot of people from New York, but you'd expect that SOMEONE in the crowd would have had a driver's license from SOME other state. (NY IDs are among the easiest to fake.)
Also -- let's say that you are setting up a function. And you get a roll of 550 tickets that you're going to use as free drink tickets. And you're expecting between 400 and 600 people to show up.
How many drink tickets would you give out per person?
That's right! Two drink tickets per person! And then, when you run out of free drink tickets halfway through the night because you've told everyone that they get two free drinks with their admission, and you've given out all your free drink tickets, you (being the person setting up the event, which is to say, NOT an employee of the Harvard Club), should tell people to go over to the cashiers (who ARE working for the Harvard Club), and tell the cashiers to give you free tickets.
I was one of the cashiers. My job was to make sure that I didn't give out any tickets without putting the appropriate amount of money into the box. This whole "We were told that you'd give us free tickets" didn't work on ANY of the cashiers, actually.
Apparently, last year,
merkcomet was one of the cashiers at this function. Someone offered him oral sex for free tickets. He turned her down, for a number of reasons, including, 1. marquessadea, 2. damnit, that's just gross, and 3. if someone considers their blowjobs to be worth only $6, that's probably not a blowjob you want, anyway.Even though I know Harvard students who I like and love, I have to say that, in the general case, I hate Harvard students. I think my rule is that all Harvard students who are NOT members of HRSFA suck.
I got out at one AM, totally fried, and I forgot to even look up what Lyman's address was, so I missed the party. I resent work for making me miss the party. I resent drunk Harvard students for making me miss the party. I resent Ron Allen, who's my temporary boss, since the COMPETENT beverage manager, John Rohanna, quit, because Ron Allen is a third-rate moron. Okay, truthfully, many of the things which went wrong last night were not his fault, but they were things that a competent manager could have predicted and headed off. And his handling of crisis situations is generally so ham-handed and stupid that he makes things worse. Also, he panics easily whenever anything even slightly UNUSUAL happens, so in situations where you actually NEED leadership, he's totally useless.
Today was better. Today was the children's Christmas party. Obviously, we were serving all non-alcoholic drinks. Except for me. I also was serving grown-up eggnog, besides the non-alcoholic kind.
In the past, I've been very clear about how, in bartending, you NEVER drink on the job (even your own stuff), and you NEVER drink the bar's booze (even on your own time.) And that drinking booze on the job is clearly a firing offense right away.
See, there's one exception to that.
Eggnog.
I mean, this dates back to the middle ages at least. At the Christmas season, things get just a little bit more relaxed, and have for centuries. The practical upshot of this is that, if you've got spiked eggnog, and there's enough for all the members, well, it's not a problem to have a glass or two of it. . .
And let me just say how much difference a little bit of Meyer's dark rum makes to a carton of pre-made Hood Golden Eggnog. (For non-Bostonians -- Hood is one of the two major dairies that serves the Boston area (the other being Garelick, and there are a number of minor dairies as wel). One of their seasonal products is cartons of eggnog.) I mean, I like Hood eggnog just fine, but it's not as good as the stuff I make myself. But add just a bit of dark rum, and -- yeah. That's the stuff.
Let me tell you. A glass of eggnog or two, Ron NOT working the function, and dealing with three-through-twelve year olds, instead of drunk, high, AND stoned college students -- that makes all the difference in the world.
I did make one suggestion to the people holding the Christmas party. One thing they did was that every kid who showed up brought a toy for Toys for Tots, which I think is an excellent idea. But then they set up a display table for some of the toys.
The kids there ranged in age from, as I said, as young as maybe three to as old as maybe twelve. With perhaps a median of eight.
I flatter myself that I'm starting to get a little bit of a handle on eight-year-olds. And what I think is that it's cruel to put out a display of toys that kids are giving away. I think that they can understand giving, and sacrifice, and those sorts of concepts BRIEFLY -- when they're actually PUTTING the toys in a bin to be given away. But then, to have them there to LOOK at all afternoon, to SEE what you aren't getting because you've given it . . . I think that a lot of the younger-than-eight kids developed "giver's remorse." They WANTED the things that were displayed so attractively, and began to resent having given them.
I pointed this out to the folks running it, suggesting that they might want to keep the bin to put the toys in, but not do the display table for party tomorrow.
"Well, it's good for these kids to learn that they can't always get what they want."
I smiled, and said that, the problem was that these kids just didn't have the brain structures yet to fully get that. They understood that LOGICALLY those toys weren't for them, but not EMOTIONALLY, and that disconnect was causing stress for them.
I don't think they understood what I was saying.
I hope they follow my advice anyway. I saw two temper tantrums which I believe, judging by body language, to have come from precisely that stress.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 04:20 am (UTC)1. The Harvard upperclass houses aren't fraternities in any sense. Basically, all Harvard students from sophomore to senior year live in one of the Houses, or if off campus, are affiliated with one of the Houses. The closest thing Harvard has to fraternities are the "final clubs," which were cut off from being officially part of Harvard in the 1980s, and yet still exist. But there's no way a Harvard student can opt out of the House system.
2. Having organized the Lowell House Spring Swing when I was a senior, I can sympathize with you over the behavior of the students. We set up a tent in the courtyard and had one entrance for control, as tickets to the event cost money. I cannot tell you the number of my fellow students who kept trying to sneak into the tent all around it, and who we had to eject because they didn't have tickets. And the excuses! ("My friend told him to meet him here; he said it was okay to come in under the tarp.")
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 05:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 05:25 am (UTC)I'm just saying.
Also, I'm now homesick for Hood milk. The weird thing about West-coast milk is that it tastes like chalk. I'm not sure if it's BGH or silage-fed cows or what, but it tastes like... like reconstituted dry milk. So if I want milk that tastes like *milk* (ie, sweet, and a little bit creamy) I have to buy organic milk for four bucks a half gallon. Which I do. Because in the long run it's cheaper than paying a buck ninety-nine for milk and pouring it out because it went bad because I didn't drink it becaue it tastes like chalk.
Um.
I'm sure that's more than you wanted to know.
Anyway, egg nog sounds v. nice.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 05:47 am (UTC)I dunno. You don't really think of New England and the Northeast as a huge dairy region, but, other than Wisconsin, milk, cheese, and ice cream come from New England, New York, and Pennslyvania.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 06:15 am (UTC)And yeah. What you said about the milk.
*sigh*
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 11:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-23 03:35 pm (UTC)You can't even get decent eggnog down here. The store brands taste like crap...but not nearly as crappy as the Turkey Hill brand. Eewwww. :-[
This year I went out specially to Trader Joe's (a good 25 minute car ride) just to get Garelick Farms eggnog. Sure, it's not the Vanilla flavor that I grew to love so much up in Boston, but it's better than nothing, right?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 06:45 am (UTC)Take 3 pints of really, really good vanilla ice cream. Scrape all the ice cream into a big bowl with a spatula, and allow it to melt in the fridge. When it's all melted, whisk in 1/2 cup of dark rum. Pour into cups and grate some fresh nutmeg on top of each.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-13 04:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-13 04:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-12-12 10:32 pm (UTC)