The Only Way to Survive Bartending Is to Get Drunk

When most people get ready to go to their jobs, they put on a uniform, gather presentation notes, and check work emails. For me, polishing off three glasses of cheap wine on my way out the door was the only preparation I needed to do a good job.

At university, I began working at a bar to earn myself some extra pocket money for nights out. With that extra money, I was going to be able to treat myself to a £7 bottle of Merlot instead of a £3 shop-branded one labelled simply as 'red'. It turns out I didn't need it: the only drinking I'd be doing from now on was whilst I was on the clock.

If you really want bartenders to enjoy their jobs, you need to let them drink. At its most basic level, giving your staff unlimited access to alcohol is a way of preserving their sanity, because punters really have no idea how annoying they are.

To clarify: They are annoying as shit. The over-confident lads, the screaming girls, the people who tap their credit card on the bar incessantly to get your attention. Even the ones who apologise profusely when making you throw away a perfectly good vodka mixer because there's a slice of lemon in it and not a lime. Yeah, that's right: even you are annoying.

Most bars I had worked at would insist that staff remain sober for the duration of their shifts, with perhaps one free house wine as a "well done" at the end of a night, but only if it had been particularly heinous. When your shift starts at bedtime and doesn't end until the sun comes up, and involves serving large groups of tossers even larger quantities of alcohol, it's enough to instill dread in you from the moment you wake up that day. (And that's usually at 2 PM—you're a night worker now.) But there was a reason why our bar was so popular, and that's because shots with the staff were mandatory. There, if I gave someone the wrong fruit in their drink, it wouldn't matter—I would just have that one. In fact—oops!—perhaps I'd make two wrong, or three ..

It's hard to be in a bad mood when you're working in a bar whilst drunk. Everyone else is wasted anyway, but you're the one that's getting paid for it. Shitfaced girls would attempt to hug me over the bar, or throw their arms round my shoulder whilst I was glass-collecting, holding me hostage in an aggressive embrace and shouting in my face that they "fucking loved" my hair. Had I been sober and in a rush to get the dirty pint glasses back to the dishwasher, I would have had no time for this shit. But, as an inebriated member of staff, I would return the embrace, and reply, "No, your hair is fucking incredible!"

During shift time, I became friends with customers I would have hated had I been sober. I could indulge people when they offered to buy me shots, instead of putting the £2.50 in a communal tip jar. In turn, people loved our carefree attitudes. They loved doing shots with us, and toasting to our friendly, out-of-control bar. They loved coming to a place where it was wasn't creepy that they knew our names, and we knew theirs—like Cheers, but with copious amounts of cocaine and Justice on a constant loop.

There were a few instances where mixing alcohol and labour turned sour, especially in a place with so few rules. Fights would erupt, and no one would be sober enough to deal with the fallout effectively. We had bouncers, but they were pretty old, and the only thing they were good at was vigorously IDing everyone on the off-chance they could refuse a teen entry and get smug about it (they only stopped IDing me on my way into work about seven months into the job). When it came to splitting up a bar brawl, it was like riding out a storm. We just had to wait for it to be over, and then be there to pick up the pieces.

At one point, someone was bottled on the street by our smoking area, and the only thing that concerned the staff was the possibility that police would be setting foot in our establishment. Staff drinks strategically lined the steps leading to the kitchen upstairs, and it didn't take a narcotics whiz to notice that the whole place was probably covered in a light dusting of coke. Drink and drugs go hand-in-hand in places like that. Need a pick-me-up? Go see the manager, where a never-ending supply of coke and a rolled tenner would await you in his office, the thud of music dulled whilst you snort a line off of the framed hygiene certificate.

People liked our bar because we were fun. We'd let you do what you want on one condition: that we could join in, too. Because hey—if you can't beat them, join them. When your job involves dealing with a continuous stream of inebriated bell-ends, sometimes getting equally as intoxicated is the only way to survive a seven-hour shift that begins at 9 PM, let alone enjoy it.

This article originally appeared on MUNCHIES in March 2015.