The Bar Rag Chronicles - An Introduction

This is my account of the trials and tribulations that face a person trying to break into the New York City bartending circuit. The plan thus far is to chronicle the seemingly impossible task of actually getting a job, a steady job, as a bartender in New York City and then the first year behind the bar.

Should the job turn out to be boring, this project will end much sooner; if it’s interesting, then it may go on past a year. It’s not that I have some huge master plan here. I don’t. I just want to document my journey.

Bartending, from my understanding, is a fairy interesting profession. I’ve heard many an interesting story from those that have stood behind the rail. If half of what I’ve heard is true, then this should make for an interesting little blog at best.

About me:

I’m a male, in my late twenties. I was born and raised in New Jersey, mere minutes away from New York City. I’ve been going to Manhattan my entire life, so I’m a bit more familiar with NYC than a fresh transplant, but not as savvy as a long-time resident. I’m a blogger, and in the interest of keeping things as anonymous as possible, I’ll be keeping my real blog separate from this one. Not that I have any secrets or that I don’t want it promoted or anything, it’s just that I want to be as honest as possible and I wouldn’t want to offend anyone. That said, I will also be changing names (if I do in fact know the names of those mentioned) of anyone I interact with as well as any detail that might give up too much. I apologize in advance for this, but my goal isn’t to hurt anyone (in any way) or to blow my own career.

The choice to become a bartender was one of need. After a series of dead end jobs, I need a change; I need a career that I actually enjoy; mostly, I need money.

I graduated college, thinking that I was on track to begin my life in the real world. That piece of paper really turned out to be a ridiculously expensive waste. I know people who either didn’t go to school, or dropped out and their doing fine. Me; well that’s a different story. Every job I’ve had since college has been a joke. Not that the jobs themselves were a joke, but the fact that I couldn’t land anything better with my degree was. I got out of college about the time that the market crashed and the job market went with it. I entered the work force with individuals that were grossly over-employed in the late nineties. That may sound like an excuse, but college student with retail experience versus former vice president of operations for So-and-so.com isn’t really much of a contest. I wouldn’t have hired me either I suppose.

I quit my last job because, while it started out to be a really interesting job, it turned into a corporate nightmare. I was underpaid, and in the end, under appreciated as well. I decided to leave after I learned what my raise was going to be, but I figured I’d hang around until our busy season was over. I didn’t have anything against my boss or the company, after all.

I told the boss of my intention to leave when things calmed down and things went on as they often do. It wasn’t until I began to butt heads with my boss over a variety of things pertaining to the job that there were some problems. I had been in this position for a number of years and was, at this time, the senior person in the post. My opinions, schedules and assessments of the workload were, for the first time, in question. I felt ignored. I had never had my work ethic questioned like this before (unjustly question, I might add).

Truth be told, I was never really supervised that closely either. It’s for this reason that I don’t blame my boss for anything. The job was sort of specialized and had many subtleties to it; things often didn’t go as planned. I always approached it with an inclination to err on the side of caution and my boss always agreed. This year, however, my boss’s bosses wanted to be more hands on and added more pressure to the mix. My boss, not understanding the parameters of my job, blamed me for things that normally occurred and questioned all of my input. After several months of conflicted understanding and disagreements, I was told that I could leave a bit earlier than my scheduled date of departure (about a day after it seemed that the busy season was over). I guess my boss was kind of sick of my shit and figured I was sick of hers; whatever, it worked for me.

I have to say that I really bear no ill will toward her despite the friction. Sometimes these things just happen. I do wish we parted on better terms, but the past is indeed the past, so I’ll just let things be.

As of right now, I graduated bartending school about a month ago. Due to personal reasons (of no real relevance to this journal) I’ve only begun my job search two weeks ago. It’s been slow going to say the least. I’ve been on a few interviews, but nothing real has come up… until today, that is.