What do you do when you're at work, it's quiet, it's going smoothly and all of a sudden your boss turns up absolutley off their box?
Not the door company boss, that'd be scary, as that amount of horse growth hormone mixed with alcohol would send anyone loopy. No, the licensee.
The person who we doorstaff theoretically work for. The person judged by the relevant authorities to be a fit and proper person to retail intoxitating liquors to the public. They turn up b*ll*xed and don't just sit there merrily sipping their large white wine. They wander round abusing customers, making them leave their drinks and leaving them threatening to report the licensee to the brewery. They shout at barstaff, in full view and hearing of all the punters on the premises, reducing them to tears and seeing them walk out. Swearing and being ballistically offensive.
What you do is find the bar manager, cowering out of the firing line for equal fear of either losing the job they and their kid need or losing the plot and smacking the boss into the middel of the street. You explain that we can either escort the licensee off the premises and get a shed load of grief from them as we've just forced them out of their own home. Or we just quietly stop letting anyone in and stop serving those within. Once the last punters leave, whilst the boss is still mid swearing rant, we shut the doors, escort the tills to the safe, collect the obvious glasses and leave them on the bar. Escort the remaining barstaff off the premises and lock the drunken fool in there.
That meant an early end of the night, but we and the staff just bundled across the road and amid the touting for job vacancies had a cool calm beer and a rather nervous laugh. I know that most of the group will never work with that licensee again. It's hard to run a pub with no staff.
Not a fun night's work. But a good solution I think. Hopefully in the painfully sober light of day the realisation of their f*ck up will leave them rather sorrowful and hopefully thinking of a new career, where they can't walk in pickled and shoot themselves in the foot with quite such aplomb.
Occasional postings from a toe-to-toe customer services physical interface operative.
The ramblings and collected tales from a jobbing licensed doorman. Tales of drunken woe, machismo, loose women, loose fists and 99% boredom. Hopefully updated as thoughts worthy of an audience hit my mind.
'Over a decade at it and not winning any beauty contests'
2 comments:
I've been a manager in the same position.
I didn't cower though, just took the arse aside, ands told him in no uncertain terms that unless they wanted to run the place themselves they'd better scurry off asap, or I'd call the police and walk out.
Worked.
Don't envy your job though, pet!
Voltan has no boos, so this problem does not present itself. But imagining for an instant that Voltan found himself in such a quandry, Voltan's solution would be a simple one. Voltan would smite his boss and seize power. This would please Voltan.
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