Somebody, please, shoot me!

So I had a very unexciting night tonight. I made five dollars! I made two cocktails for the cocktail server (Heather) and made two drinks for people at the bar. I got coffee for Lakia's group who were cold calling for the Obama campaign on health reform, but they gave me cake! I ordered food for Mike and Tico made me a burger for dinner ( I know, realllll healthy!!). I decided to walk home because I didn't want to wait for the bus and I didn't want to spend any money at the bar. We get paid tomorrow and I need to pay some bills, but more importantly I need to make some money so I can buy some things that I need. Tomorrow will be a better day. I get to work with the new server Ronda. She is nice and very attractive and is also a bartender, so she knows what she is doing. Now I'm going to do some laundry and catch up on The New York Times for the week and probably drink a beer. I have the most exciting life ever!!

And it just keeps going.

I'm having a good day today. I'm well rested. I saw alot of my friends last night. I didn't drink to much. I've been talking to my roommate most of the day about the state of our lives and our future professional goals once we move from Ohio. The new restaurant is going rather well. We have had our liquor licence for just over a week now. We have been doing a nice happy hour with drink and food specials and live music Monday through Friday afternoons. I'm finally making real money. This translates into my ability to actually pay bills on time and begin paying rent again.
As for last night, I went to a club downtown for a few minutes with two people from work. It was kind of lame. It wasn't real busy. The DJ was good, but no one was dancing because they were not crowded. The bartenders were adequate, but one of them had to have a bar back show here which bottle was the Grand Mariner! Kinda sketchy! My friend Kelley called me to see if I was on my way to the mall where we all worked together for Dawn's going away. (Dawn is moving to Texas with her baby-daddy!) I told her no, but then I got one the people I was with to give me a ride up, and I was very glad that I did. I saw just about everyone I know that works at that mall. I got to catch up with all my friends and hear all their latest stories. It was a good time. I get to work a private party later tonight and then I have tom morrow off. It should be a good weekend.

New Job

I got a job at a new independent restaurant in the downtown area. We don't have a liquor license yet so we are just serving breakfast and lunch. The owners are nice and the GM is very cool. He appreciates me and all the knowledge I have to offer. He likes the fact that I work hard and he makes me want to contribute to the success of this restaurant. I pretty much took over the Togo part of lunch (I'm just not making much money off of it) and run it out of the bar. It's a crap shoot as to whether or not I'm going to be busy with Togo on any given day. I have slowly started to get some gentleman who sit at the bar for lunch. I get tipped on every other Togo, so I am starting to make a little bit of money, but I'm waiting for my paycheck on Friday so I can get my checking account out of the negative. The girls from The Seafood Restaurant keep calling and checking on me. That's nice. Some of them want to come to Sunday Brunch at the new restaurant to see me and to have some of the wonderful homemade food that we are serving. After having opened six corporate restaurants, I knew opening an independent restaurant was going to be a different experience, but I didn't realize how difficult it would be when the owners of this new restaurant have no experience in the industry! They are doing OK for right now, but just OK. The kitchen needs some serious work! We have no experienced line cooks! I've run kitchen shifts and I've expedited quite a bit. This new kitchen falls down every day. Part of that has been the computer system. The computers were set up specifically for this store so we have quite a few bugs to work out. We have the system running pretty smooth. I have had the opportunity to work with the computer guy. He is way cool. He is 75 and has been doing this type of things for years, both in the military and for NCR. He started out training people how to use cash registers. The front-of-house is good. We have some good servers and the place looks great! We definitely need to purchase many more place settings. The bar needs a major amount of work. We need to purchase pretty much everything that you would need for a new bar. Plus, we need to put together a wine list, decide which beers and liquors to carry, and need to formalize happy hour and hire some bartenders. There is potential for this place to be great...as long as they hire the right people and make the right decisions. I just want us to open for dinner so I can make some money. The bills don't stop when your unemployed for three weeks and they just get worse when your making less than twenty dollars a day in tips. The only thing that has saved me financially has been my roommate. He has been supporting me for almost two months now. He has taken care of the rent, utilities and the Internet bill. I would be living at my parents house right now if not for him and the dog. I'll write more when we open for dinner or if I find another job. There is a new wine bar opening next month...I will apply there and, if I'm hired, might work both jobs. I'm not sure. I'll keep you posted.

Being a grownup sucks

I'm alive! I say this because I haven't posted anything in a long time. Nothing new and exciting is happening. Work is still work and it still sucks. My co-workers are great and my managers still suck-great-big-donkey-balls! I would like to find a new job, but it is almost impossible in this economy to do that. I still have a good schedule and make great money, but I get weary of putting up with all the corporate policies and the whimsical nature of my managers thought process. Today is a day off and I need to do some day off things, i.e., errands, laundry, catch up on reading, see a movie, stop and talk to some people at other restaurants. I already have spoken with my parents this week. My roommate is very busy with school, work and his gf. As of today, I am five months into my one year suspension on my driver's license. That makes life harder, especially with spotty public transportation, but I am getting through it well. Not being able to drive is another reason for not quitting my current job. I'm trying to get hired on at one of the other bars in the mall where I work, but it is taking a long time. I know the regional manager very well, so its just a matter of waiting for something to open up. Oh well, back to reading. I'll post more later.

Talk about getting your ass kicked!

So, last night ended up being a very bad and very good night for me. I usually open on Sundays as a manager and stay until sometime between five and seven. The closing manager shift usually rotates between the dreaded Bar Manager and The Service Manager. Because of the Christmas and New Year's holidays things were different this week. I had originally requested off a few days between Christmas and New Year's so I could go to Tennessee and see my parents and brothers and my newborn nephew. Because of my legal troubles in November and the fact that my license is suspended for a year, I was not able to make the trip. So, The GM worked yesterday with The Bar Manager. I closed the bar because Christi is on a ski trip right now with her friends. Boy did she miss out on a night! Sunday nights are usually pretty slow, but steady. We do about one hundred to one hundred fifty covers and about three to four thousand in sales. Not last night though. We did almost three hundred covers and almost seven thousand in sales! There is usually a cocktail server scheduled, but because we are starting to go into the slow season, this was the first week that they didn't schedule one. The cocktail will get one or two tables and just eat up time on the clock for four hours or so. We had six servers in the dining room, which is plenty. We went through about four hours of hell. The Bar Manager ran service well for most of the night. I helped some people on the wood, but mainly waited on cocktail tables. Some of my regulars came in and I felt bad because I know they did not get the best service, but they understood and still tipped well. Needless to say, we went on a wait so people came into the bar to wait for their tables and get a drink, which would have been fine if I didn't have the bar and the bar tables. So I had people waiting at the bar and at tables and people eating at the bar and at tables and the service printer going crazy. It sucked, but I made a ton of money. One of the managers of The Tavern, Cory, came over right when we were closing to have a drink in between doing inventory. When I got done I went over there to see her and all the bartenders there and have a drink while they were closing. I met up with some of my people from work at Bar X and had another drink then caught the bus home and watched some TV with my roommate. I have had a crazy few days and made so much money, which I need to pay all the bills that seem to accumulate even more quickly right now. Until tomorrow.