Bartender stories

It has been raining the whole morning and I am getting sick of rearranging the paragraphs in my degree project... might just as well write something.

Last Friday night I was managing the pub at the place (ok, one of the places) I work. The music was nice (I was choosing it), the orders were going smooth... until THEY came. Among students in Uppsala there is a peculiar habit called pub crawling. This would probably need some explanation. In our little town with 200 000 inhabitants, 40 000 of which are students, there are 13 student unions. Much like fraternities in the United States, but it is compulsory to be a member of one of them. Each and every of these "nations", as they are called, has its own pub. A pub crawl is therefore an event which comprises visiting every student pub in town and having one beer in it. Now, thirteen beers on one night are manageable, though for the price of repeated visits to the toilet. What is really putting a strain on the whole affair is that the pubs are only open from 18.00 to 01.00, with the bars refusing to take orders after 00.30. This leaves exactly half an hour for each pub. That is, if you could teleport from pub to pub with the beer waiting for you. Since the powers of telekinesis are still lacking in the common population, one has to go between the pubs. And some of them lie good 15 minutes from one another... and the time needed to reach the next one increases proportionally with the amount of the imbibed beverages. So actually you have 10 minutes per beer. And this is dangerously near to this particular state when one has to pray to the porcelain god... those usually leave a bad aftertaste. For my part, I prefer a little slower-paced drinking... and more eating.

Back to our story. It was around 11 o'clock when a jolly laughing gang endeavouring such a holy quest as conquering all the pubs in Uppsala came to GH nation. One of them was particularly under the influence, with walking trajectory representing a line from the second degree ("A curved line from the first degree is a straight line!", my lab assistant in mathematics during my freshman year in Bulgaria). According to protocol (and trusting a sudden prophetic revelation about near future cleaning-events should I do otherwise), I refused to serve her alcohol on the account that she was too intoxicated. "How do you see I'm drunk", she asked me. "Well, for one part, you are talking too damn high and are irritating all the other guests, and for the other, you couldn't even walk in a straight line from the bar to the piano". Trying to prove me wrong she marched on to the piano... proving only that the zigzag is the shortest distance between two pubs. So when I told her that under no circumstances this evening I was going to give her anything with a higher alcohol concentration than tap water, she was infuriated.

"What are you, a fucking Russian?", she asked me? Well, I certainly have not had intercourse with anyone from that country, so I regretfully admitted that this was not the case. Then she apparently thought I was deaf or blind or suffering from a short term memory loss, because she started speaking from a distance of half a centimetre from my nose. Now, I am a tall guy so she had to stretch up really good, which made me snicker despite my futile efforts to keep a stern face. Seeing this she showed me the finger (I managed to restrain myself from grabbing that finger and breaking it, now that would have been foolish), and left the pub to everybody's relief. Later, one of the waitresses reported having seen her urinating on the outer wall of the pub, thus exacting her revenge. Sadly, it was utterly pointless in the light of the huge amount of water coming down from the sky two days later. I cannot think of any moral for this story, but rumours about this encounter spread fast in the nation and everybody was equally amused and appalled. Except the real Russian, he was laughing his heart out.