And four and a half years ago, I desperately wanted to quit my job. I’ve worked as a bartender for the past 15 years. My entire adult life.
Two months ago I finally quit. It had less to do with the burnout or the general stress or the guilty conscience of serving poison or cleaning up all the results. I’d built up a new thickness of skin for those things. They bothered me more the first couple years clean. My boss was just an asshole. And I had to see him a lot more after our manager quit in January and no one took his place.
I didn’t have another job lined up. I took a month off. I just needed to get away. I’ve thought for years now that distance from that place would be another big step in healing- distance from the sights and smells and poor decisions and avoidable consequences and sad-sack non-sequiturs. I made a lot of friends at that bar over the years but, even them. I never want to walk into a bar again. I don’t want to think about alcohol even in terms of cocktail specs or ABV or charcoal filtration or terroir or trivial anecdotes about why the Angostura label’s so much bigger than the bottle.
A month ago I started a retail job at a large, local bookstore. So far, the mechanics of retail feel exactly like bartending (without the tips, obviously) only my product isn’t swallowable. Returns confuse me. No one came into the bar three days later with a melted margarita, asking for their money back. And my new customers don’t rot at the register for 8-12 hours every day bending my ear. They come. They go. I get my 40 hours. I don’t have to feign interest for an extra 5% on the tip line. That interest became more soul-crushing to feign every day. Every year. Anytime a down-in-the-dumps customer asked me for advice, all I really wanted to do was point them in simple directions away from there, because from my side, it was clear the bars were causing all their problems. Each and every one of them. Instead I’d internalize that frustration and go home as deep in the dumps as any of the sorry drunks who asked me.
At the bar, when new young barbacks would start, the obvious icebreaker for a veteran like me was “what do you like to drink?” Because of course, I must know all the best drinks. And I do. But I don’t recommend a single one of them. And there’d be awkwardness every time I revealed I was sober. Not just awkwardness, but stick-in-the-mudness, which painted me as a nonbeliever, an outsider, made me feel like I belonged even less in an environment that once fed all my passions. An environment I didn’t even \*want\* to exist in anymore but felt I’d staked a claim. A claim I’d tarnished by moving on.
I’m one month into the bookstore, and if I come home frustrated at all, it’s because of traffic. I haven’t been asked once by any of my new coworkers what I like to drink. Or where. They know I bartended. I’m sure they assume I know how to party. And I do. But I just want to go home. I want to finally let that old wound heal. I want to not be reminded all day long of who I used to be anymore.
I just got a job at a local bookstore. It’s a busy, buy/sell/trade place. The work environment is mostly loose but it’s still run pretty corporate.
This is my first job outside of the bar and restaurant industries. Those are the only kinds of jobs I held previously. As tiring as it gets to hear, it’s true that your coworkers can start to feel like family in a bar or restaurant, being in the trenches together. I met my wife at the restaurant I worked at years ago. All my close friends today were made at these jobs.
So far at the new job, all my coworkers have been pretty standoffish. In the breakroom, everybody sits silently and barely acknowledges each other. Two weeks in, I’ve started to understand why that is. But being new, I feel a pressure to try and spark conversations so that *I* don’t appear standoffish myself. Every time I try though, by asking simple questions with obvious followups, they leave me hanging. It’s started to feel insulting, like I should just shut up and stop trying. But then I worry I’ll insult *them* if I stop talking.
Am I overthinking it? Is this an average workplace culture in retail? I’m well aware we’re all only there for the paycheck. I’m just used to working alongside people who put in at least a little effort to make the workday feel less soul-crushing.
I’ve worked strictly in restaurants and bars for the past twenty years, since I was 15.
The first shock I felt on shift today was how slow all my new coworkers are. They dragged their feet around and chatted with each other while I was zipping around the store and behind the counter with a speed that wouldn’t surprise anyone in this sub, but that honestly seemed to unsettle everyone. Even customers. I’m realizing that the shock I’m feeling shouldn’t be that everyone else is slow, but that I’ve had to spend my entire adult life rushing so fast over such trivial shit.
There’s an Anthony Bourdain quote I butcher in my head a lot about working the line that I’ve always thought translates well for bartenders too, something like: “we’re frustrated by regular society because we don’t understand why the world can’t run as smoothly as our kitchens”. I think about this every time I go anywhere that isn’t a bar or restaurant, anywhere I have to wait in line for longer than it takes me to greet, serve and charge a large group of new customers.
It’ll be a huge learning curve to figure out how to let myself move slowly. It’s just not in my bones. It’s crazy how fast and efficient we’re expected (required) to be over food and drinks while the entire rest of the world gets to drag their feet.
Tomorrow I get a half-hour lunch break. And two tens. All of them mandatory. Soon I’ll have accrued one paid sick day. Health insurance after a month. Who knew you could get paid to go on vacation? Every day’s gonna be a whole new shock.