Audio Clip Transcript
This will be my 35th year behind the bar. I'm a lifer. This is all I know. The reason we're in the service industry is because there's something wrong with us. There's plenty of ways to make money if you have the kind of intelligence and problem solving ability that we have. But for some reason, we have gotten to the point where we like to see the smile on people's faces. A lot of us are people pleasers.
What I don't like about my job, and that's a very easy one, it's the instability, you really don't know from one day to the next, if you have a job or not. I can tell you, probably four or five times in my career, I've been working at a place where I like my coworkers, I like the staff. I like everything that's happening, I'm making a good living. And I show up one day on a Wednesday, and the doors are locked. And there's a chain with the lock around the door and the county has told us that we were now evicted. And your next response is well, I guess my last paychecks bouncing. And that happens all the time.
You go from being in a good work environment, to working with a guy who's a monster in one day. This industry is so chaotic. And it is so filled with unprepared employers, with bad employers, with dishonest employers. They hire a new general manager and all of a sudden the manager is incompetent. Or the new general manager is misogynist, or the new general manager is a racist, or he's a thief.
Sexual harassment in this in this business has been rampant for decades. Last place I worked in, in Atlanta, it was two gay gentlemen that ran the place. Dude, one night, we all go out drinking after work, because, you know, everybody does. And next thing I know, I turn around and my boss has his hand between my legs. And I'm like, wait a minute, that guy just grabbed my junk, that's not okay! It's happened to me on more one occasion. I have, I know for a fact that I have lost jobs because I would not sleep with my boss. And this happens way more with women than with men. But I mean, you get a reputation for being a "ballbuster" or being you know, "not a team player" or being a "feminazi". I mean, women are so incredibly disadvantaged in this business easy to get in, but it's very difficult to advance. You just get abused and then you have no rights. There's never a recourse. I mean, most places are right-to-work states, they can fire you for no reason whatsoever. And employers talk about, well, we really believe in work-life balance. The f--k you do, no you don't. And they, well, you know, we encourage you to take time off. No, you don't. The system is set up so that you don't take your vacation time. Because if I'm making you know, $1,000 a week, I take a week off, I'm not getting paid $1,000 a week. I'm getting paid my salary, which is five bucks an hour. That doesn't help me at all. You know, so you take a sick day, you take a hit. You take a vacation day, you take a hit.
I don't remember the last time that I called out of work. I mean the last time that I didn't show up to do a shift of mine was when a customer attacked me, he broke my nose, fractured two of my ribs, and I didn't show to work the next day because I had to go to the hospital. I was at work fifteen minutes after my father died. And you think about that later and you go, holy sh-t, what's wrong with me? You know, how did I just blow that off?
We tend to not have work-life balance and we deal with adversity by just moving forward. That's why addiction levels are so high, that's why alcoholism is so high, abuse, you know, self-destructive behavior is commonplace. My buddy Troy Champion, came from Parody, Louisiana, Cajun country, and moved to New Orleans to become a bartender, that's what he wanted to do. And I trained him as a barback, taught him how to tend bar, and he was very successful. But Troy was one of those people who couldn't say no and he was drinking too much. And I begged him, so many times, get out of that place, come live with me, and uh, last year he died of cirrhosis of the liver. Right through my f--king fingers. There was nothing I could do, I was so powerless to help him get out of that, get out of that life. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of tragedy in this, in this business.
I've lost, I can't count off the top of my head, how many people I know that have died from overdoses or suicides in this business. It's a thing. I remember a friend of mine, he and I had a shop together, and he kind of smiled sardonically and said, New Orleans, man, it's a hell of a party, but you wind up burying a lot of your friends. And in this business, you just bury a lot of your friends. You rely on each other because you can't rely on anybody else, because most people don't know what this business is like. A lot of us call people who don't work in the restaurant industry, we call them civilians, you know, and people go, oh you're dating a civilian? How's that working? You know. So yeah, you turn to each other because there's nowhere else to go. And the horrible things that happen to you is just a part of life, and, and people go, oh, yeah, yeah, that happened to me once too. Here, have some Jamison, you know, have a shot.