Notice Of Eviction.

As I made my bleary-eyed way to the pub yesterday morning (I'm sorry, but if you expect me to do anything remotely taxing before 1PM, you're in for a disappointment), I did something that has been happening more and more these days - I went to open the door only to find it has been locked. This invariably means that Eddie is in - everyone else leaves the door slightly ajar, which says "staff can come in, but not you" in the way only an acute angle can (this is a similar trick operated by shops who open their shutters a little bit in the mornings to allow the staff in, operating on the flimsy assumption that nobody would dare get on their belly and wriggle their way into a not-quite-ready Clinton's Cards), and Frances leaves the thing so widely open that people naturally assume we're open, only for her to turn them away as if they are somehow mentally deficient (after all, who just goes ahead and assumes a shop or business is open just because the doors are completely open and all the lights are on? I ask you...).

While the locked door brings some good news - Eddie's in - it also brings with it a dilemma; I have to log onto the tills at least a quarter of an hour before the doors are flung open to the public, and it was already twenty minutes and counting (I'm meant to be there half an hour beforehand, but it's not as if you open the doors to gangs of people just itching to pay over the odds for sub-par cask ale in a pub that's either a bit too hot or a bit too cold, in seemingly perpetual twilight and hiring people like me and Eddie to run the show). So all I have to do is call the pub and get Eddie to let me in. Oh, no, my mobile's in my other trousers. Right, so I've got to knock on the door. An exercise in futility, seeing as both doors are a few inches thick and made of extremely hard wood. So a few knuckle-smashingly useless knocks transpire with no sign of life from indoors. Right.

Now most normal people at this point would have decided to go home and get their phone, ring Eddie on the way back and have him waiting with the door open like a hotel doorman, but I'm not a morning person - evident from the fact that my next logical step was to break in. Brilliant, I thought - this'll look great at my development meeting next week. "So dedicated he will literally break into his place of work." Knowing the place like the back of my hand, I knew that almost every concealed entrance is guarded by some rather large fencing - however, I also know that on the other side of that fencing are some large dumpsters. So I simply dragged a bench up to the fence and decided to jump on three. What didn't help was adjusting my body at two and half and seeing that the bins were, in fact, my side of the fence.

As I hobbled in through the cellar's loading doors, I saw Eddie casting a cautionary glance at the rotas on the wall. The rotas are the dictatorship - as sympathetic as the place usually is to holiday requests (in my time here I have not once been denied time off, nor have I seen others be denied it - it doesn't exactly take a lot of people to deal with our average number of customers, which is currently hovering just below the twenty mark, although there have been times where I haven't even poured enough of our dishwater house ale to cover my own paltry salary for the hours I was there), this thing decides when you're here, when you're not, what nights you can have to yourself; this beer-spattered sheet of A4 controls you and eventually has more say-so in what you get up to than you do. So Eddie had probably been dealt a duff shift or the like, and would invariably try and palm it off on me, the sponge. I decided to break the ice.

"Whatever shift you've got you're not palming it off on me you fucking sponge."
Just kidding.

"Alright mate," I croaked as I fumbled my keys onto the tills. "You left the front door locked again."
"Hmm?"
"What are you looking at?" I snatched the rota from his hand. I was expecting something to keep Eddie in this state of near-catatonia, but I saw nothing of note. Slowly, a finger invaded my line of sight and rigorously tapped the bottom of the rota - "list of active staff". At the bottom of the rota is a legend which dictates what the initials stand for; Frances is FB, Henry is HG, and down at the bottom of the list was the name of our latest hire; CD - Christine Dwight.
"So? A new starter. We have a new -" then Eddie tapped the date; she was coming in at 1PM. This meant only one thing.
"So we've got to train her then..." But this wasn't what was bothering him. "And? Have you met her or what?"
"No."
"So what then?"
"C'mon man, look - the men to women ratio is now 1. C'mon." I was evidently not getting something here. "I'll tell you something man, all those women's lib groups have the companies running scared. There's all this equality in the workplace bullshit - fuck that." I certainly wasn't getting that. I threw my jacket off and left it in a heap in the cutlery cupboard. Eddie followed me out into the bar as I put the nozzles on the taps.

"I'm telling you now dude, we're for the jump. I guarantee you, within six months, we'll be the only blokes working here."
"So what if we are? It's not like they're going to give us a sex change operation or anything. Edwina."
"I'm not kidding dude, this is it." And if by "it" he meant "preposterously gigantic servings of ill-thought-out bullshit", he was spot on.

While I wasn't annoyed for quite the same reasons as Eddie, I was still a little exasperated at the thought of dragging yet another person, kicking and screaming, into this trade. Training new staff is, without exception, a long and laborious process that latches onto your brain and devours both your mental and physical energy - I often wonder if it would be easier to get a job in a call centre, if only because the training would probably be something along the lines of "answer the phone and then pass the call to another building when you get bored or in trouble". Every other job I've had, the training has been quick and painless, as all the information you need to get by is shot into your head with one swift round - "dodge this person, that person, and the routes to the staffroom that aren't on camera are here, here and here, table football league is Tuesday evenings and this week's password for the vending machine should be written on the shoes stockroom door by ten tomorrow morning, the Bungster hasn't had a chance to have a look at it yet", as I was informed at my role of seasonal sales assistant at a high-street department store - but training people up in a pub is like trying to beat a whale to death with a cotton swab; you try for weeks until you realize it'd be much easier to just get in its mouth and let it choke on you, killing the pair of you in the process, by which time the whale has since gotten bored and wandered off (often to attempt to put the tap into a keg without knowing how, resulting in a beautiful fountain of profit splashing to the ground around your feet as they realize that the rest of the plugs have caps on them for a reason). I was definitely a difficult person to train, as everybody is the first few weeks - the feeling of walking a tightrope doesn't go away for a few months.

We flung the doors open to the general public to little fanfare, as per usual, and Eddie and I got back to the more pressing issue of throwing a tennis ball across the bar. This kind of thing always used to annoy me - whenever I would go to PC World or whatever to see a couple of pastel-plastered pre-pubescent pricks kicking a box around the Mac aisle, I would become quite indignant; how dare these jumped-up little arseholes amuse themselves in front of the customers, boo on them; I would hiss and throw Ethernet cables at them before hounding for their resignations as if they were Blunkett and Blair. However, I have since realized that workplace games are the tits, and I became overwhelmed with a strange sense of elation when somebody left a tennis ball here. So for the last four months, Eddie and I open up shop, go to the ice machine, lift up the service hatch and retrieve our tennis ball. We then return to normal operations - Henry has long since stopped chastising us for the tennis ball - we have never broken anything, and we can see customers coming a mile away; all we need is three seconds notice and we can both be stood behind the bar, tennis ball hidden, ready to serve a customer, who will never, ever know what an absolute pack of jokers are in charge of this pub. And it's important we maintain this facade for as long as we can; as much as both of us may gripe about this job and long for the day we can smash Dickie Dixon's slobber-rimmed pint glass over his flat, bloated head, it's important to both of us that we at least appear to be doing our jobs properly until such time as we can fulfill our wildest fantasies and lay the pain down on Dickie.

1PM came and went, without sight nor sound of customer or Christine. This is always a good first impression to make if you're starting a new job. In any other job, this is considered rude, unprofessional, and is possibly a blight on your record for all eternity (or cause enough to sack you if you're, say, a brain surgeon or a fireman), but in this job it's a particularly bad idea as it gives Eddie's absurd ideas an opportunity to ferment, his brain concocting a more grotesque caricature of you with every empty, hollow minute that sails between his ears.

"Maybe she's decided not to bother." After a few minutes, this reasonable explanation transforms, gets angry and turns green; morphing with a rip and a bulge into the Lou Ferrigno of explanations...
" Maybe she heard that we were just too fucking tough." Eddie has this really weird view of our stance at work; because we're the first port of call in times of trouble, he thinks we're some sort of Welsh take on Starsky and Hutch. While I admit we have done some serious time behind that bar - Christmas Eve being the benchmark against which all busy nights and understaffed farces shall be measured - we are certainly not a crimefighting duo who come along on silver horses to save the day and round up the posse. How I wish we were a crimefighting duo who come along on silver horses to save the day, but this is not the case and the sooner Eddie comes to terms with this the better.
"Or maybe her car stalled, Eddie," I corrected, throwing the tennis ball back to him. "Besides, unless somebody's told her, we can't assume that she knows what a pair of losers we are."
"That's true enough." Then a thunderous screech came from outside; a car ground to a halt as Eddie hid the tennis ball. I leaped over the bar and assumed my "professional" look - matter-of-fact expression, arms at sides, leaning on the back bar. Pure class, pal. However, none of this would be needed, as I could see the driver stumble out of the car looking like some sort of psychopath. Of course.

Christine strolled through the front door and as she slammed the large oak slab into its frame behind her, I was hit with the very frank realization that the training process could be quite a long one. Snapping gum open-mouthed as she sauntered in, Christine cast a very distinct impression - with her powder-blue hooded tracksuit (from Fifty Cent's notorious "G Unit" line, a line of clothing so unabashedly drenched in hip-hop stereotypia that I'm amazed they don't come complete with a keyring for the keys to your Jeep limousine and a wallclock to wear around your neck) and undoubtedly expensive handbag (you know it must have been expensive because it's one of those ones that is so comically small you'd be hard pressed to fit what little change you have left from the purchase of the bag into it). Christine is the kind of person you see on BBC news stock footage, all dressed up to the nines in the best outfit Primark has to offer and so much foundation on her face you could build an extremely sturdy house upon it, struggling to stand as she keels over a bin, vomiting up four hours' worth of hard liquor and a few kebabs as a dour-voiced presenter laments our binge-drinking culture (she is then the person you see on YouTube or other sites of that ilk, represented by poorly-lit blocks of colour from the lense of a mobile phone and with such poor audio integrity that you get the impression the whole thing was filmed underwater, starting a fight with a bronze statue on Queen Street - the video, entitled "DRUNK GIRL FIGHTS STATUE LOL", will amass a million views over the weekend as the internet takes another step towards ruining the universe). The kind of person who doesn't have a single story to relate that doesn't begin with "the other night I got absolutely hammocked", or some other absolutely absurd codeword for getting so drunk you have trouble remembering the difference between fingers and thumbs. While all this may seem like a particularly horrible assumption to make of somebody based on nothing more than their looks, now seems as good a time as any to tell you the first words to come out of her mouth.

"Sorry I'm late boys, I got absolutely fucking cemented last night. It was my leaving do last night from my last job and we got pure bricked."

Evidently the term "plastered" has run its course (and yet I sit and wait patiently for the day it becomes socially acceptable to say "ugh, I got absolutely crazy paved the other night", although I fear this is off the agenda for as long as Crazy Paving itself is considered out of fashion), and from the looks of things, Eddie's patience went with it, as no sooner had he made his judgement, he decided to excuse himself for a cigarette. Christine pulled up a chair next to me in the bar, and I thought it might be a good idea to see just how many times I'd have to repeat myself before going home at 3:30.

"So have you worked in a pub before, Christine?"
"Oh yeah, big time - busier than this as well." Now, in my experience, if you get people who claim they're used to "way busier pubs than this", those people usually wind up calling you on your mobile when you're at a gig because there's three people waiting and they've run out of slimline tonic. I'd rather they were honest.

"No, I've never worked in a pub before. At some point today, I will try and pour bitter the same way you would pour water out of a tap into a cup - I won't ask why the tap is shaped like that, just like you didn't on your first day; nobody would assume you have to put the nozzle in the bottom of the glass, that would be madness. I have never seen a man throw up down his own trousers. I have never been doused in warm, stale beer by a clumsy glass collector or a slippery drip tray. I have not once had to pour three drinks at once while an extremely drunk woman brings a half-full wine bottle back to the bar, insisting on a replacement at the top of her winelogged lungs and asserting that we had, in fact, served it to her half-full, and she hasn't drunk half of it, deary me no. I don't know what it's like to work in a fishtank, thousands of dead eyes staring at you day in, day out, expecting more and more as each drink goes hurtling towards their stomach, faster than they can ever hope to metabolize it, resulting in them crying on your shoulder about how their wives no longer love them and you've always been, like, their best friend, man. I don't know what the fines are for serving alcohol to minors, nor do I know how to spot a police sting operation. I don't know the difference between a firkin and a barrel. I don't know where the ice machine is, and I didn't know you have to clean beer lines at least once a week. I know absolutely nothing about this trade, so for the next few months I will not interrupt you, or correct you, or interfere in an area about which I clearly know nothing just to get involved for the sake of it. My brain is clay, get molding."

That would be a pretty good opening line. But no, Christine has seen and done it all before - once we did a quick explanation of the system, we waited for a customer. The door opened - Eddie sauntered in, and the tennis ball championships resumed.

"Is this all you do all day? Throw a tennis ball around?" I gave this careful consideration. What else did we do? I was hard pushed to remember life BTB - before tennis ball.
"No, sometimes we go over the shops to buy a paper, Eddie has a few cigarettes, and sometimes we play darts."
"This is boring. This is so boring. I'm bored." Eddie threw me a look, then the tennis ball. "Isn't there anybody?"
"No," Eddie said sharply. "It's just us until 2PM. So I recommend getting good at one of the staff games, which are darts, throwing cards into a bucket and throwing beermats into the fire. Then work out your average and put it in the back of the diary." The back of the diary contains the Honour League - we have devised points systems for all the staff games, and if you do well (and you're honest about it) you can write your score down next to the name of the game in the back of the bookings diary. Everybody comes around to it in the end - originally offended by the notion that throwing things into the fire is a much-regarded and fiercely-protected staff sport, Frances is now the champion of Matfire, as she has a mean curling action.
"What about the tennis ball?"
"That's my tennis ball." Normally I wouldn't suggest getting so possessive over a dirty old tennis ball you found in the beer garden, but we had developed the tennis ball game over several months - we had bonded over it; it was how we whittled away the wasted hours. Much as people in the trenches would play cards and people on graveyard shifts as night guards and the like get good at bouncing coins, we were good at throwing a tennis ball back and for. We had even developed obstacles - all throws must bounce off a table, for example, or a wall. But before Christine could probe any further, she leaned in and did the unthinkable; she intercepted the tennis ball midair. Eddie put his hand out, but it was evidently not going to be returned until Christine's questions had been answered.

"Woman, don't -"
"When's food served?"
"This is ridi-" Christine aimed at the fire.

"All day."
"Really all day or pub all day?"
"Pub all day, we stop at 9 and if Elaine doesn't feel like cooking, 'sorry pal, the cook's off sick'."
"What are the busiest nights?"
"Darts on Monday, Quiz on Wednesday, Christmas Eve is a massacre."
"How many holidays do we get a year?"
"24 days to be taken before the first Friday of December."
"What's the rate of pay?"
"Shit."
"What's the manager really like?"
"A major improvement."
"Over what?"
"The last manager."
"Who's the worst customer?"
"Dickie Dixon."
"What time does he get here?"
"2PM."
"Where's the cellar?"
"Through there."

And with that, the hostage was returned and Christine advanced on the cellar. She was right to ask these questions, but to hold the tennis ball captive was a step too far.

Christine was, for the next hour, a whirlwind - going into everything, being ridiculously thorough in her self-guided tour, as Eddie gave me ominous nods from across the room; this, to him, was it; the brewery had folded to these supposed "women's groups" who have apparently been rallying night and day to get more women working in pubs, where sexual harassment is not really so much an issue as a form of entertainment (if any more people get into it we'll have to declare it on the license as an attraction - "come and make seedy innuendo and leer without shame at womens' tits! Every night, right here! Phwoar, that sounds a bit rude, doesn't it? All this and more!") and you can actually see the punters thinking with all their might, trying as hard as they can to concoct a credible, believable reason as to why the female staff need to give them their phone numbers ("what if I'm on the way here and I want to pre-order a pint? I'm not ringing the pub... I'm just not, now what's your number?") or just strip off ("it's getting awful hot in here... best get that shirt off love. I'll help you."). I'm sure Germaine Grier and the gang are just weeks away from a march outside Parliament, burning bras and bartowels in a symbolic gesture. I'm not saying women shouldn't work in this trade, not by a long shot; I just don't think this job is a suitable job for anyone, and I've got it easy, being a man and all (not a particularly manly man, but a man nonetheless; I have chopped down a tree and I have told somebody off in a queue for being out of order, both activities that require an absurd amount of testosterone to even consider) - working in this business is a hundred times harder if you're a woman.

Once she had finished probing into every little thing, gleaning every possible detail, 2PM came and went and we were joined by our first customers of the day.

"Right, fuck off, give me marks out of ten at the end."
"I'm sorry?"
"You two go and sit in the bar and see how I manage this."

Too perplexed to argue, Eddie and I filed out into the bar as Christine dealt with Peter and Gwyn - Bitter drinkers - and the one and only Richard Alexander Dixon. Dick Dixon, so good they named him twice.

"You're new, are you?" asked Peter in a voice so unabashedly monotonous it pulls you in by the scruff of your neck, and as you start to slip out of consciousness you begin to understand why he shuffles around the village like a passive observer to life, a zombie with no desire for flesh, just a mild addiction to extremely week beer. Christine yawned - everyone yawns the first time. That's how boring Peter's voice is.
"Yeah, I just moved here with my dad - he used to run the Cargo Hatch, I used to work the bar there."

Eddie nearly choked on the coffee that he had seemingly pulled out of thin air (Eddie would make an excellent magician - he can divert your attention from anything if it means less work for him, like not making me a cup of coffee). The Cargo Hatch is the company's main gaff in the heart of Cardiff; it has since amassed a sort of Excaliburesque quality among the managers, although no hyperbole or rumour is anywhere close to the truth of how much business that pub does. Maybe Christine is used to busier pubs after all; the last leaderboard I saw had the Cargo Hatch making an average of £92,000 a week. A gigantic, four-floor complex on one of Cardiff's busiest streets, The Cargo Hatch is where the company's bread is not only buttered, but dipped in caviar, gilded, and then polished to a nice golden shine with the back side of the original copy of The Mona Lisa. Christine isn't the person you see drunk on the grainy CCTV footage of Cardiff after all - she just looks it. She's actually far more likely to be the person you see talking to the BBC reporter about how the alcohol industry has been doing this, that and the other to stop binge drinking. Christine is not the effect, she is the cause, and in a big way if she's been running the Cargo Hatch.

"That's a busy pub."
"It is, ninety two grand a week is nothing to be sniffed at."

All of a sudden, Eddie and I's four grand keelhaul on Christmas Eve seemed pallid and sickly, like the Tiny Tim to her... well, all the Cratchett kids were in a pretty bad way, I suppose, but we didn't know busy any more. We hadn't scratched the surface of busy. We hadn't so much as looked at a picture of the paw of the lion of busy.

"Well, let's see if you can pull a pint," piped up Dixon from the back. Eddie and I went back to the tennis ball game - Christine had asked us not to meddle so meddle we certainly would not. Besides, we invented a new game; beermatball. Got a tennis ball and a table with corners? Pat the ball back and forth with whatever beermats you have to hand, trying to knock it over the edge of your opponent's end of the table while simultaneously defending it from falling into your lap. This could also work in an office or something, I suppose, but childlike behaviour from grown men is generally more acceptable in pub settings.

However, no sooner had we gotten the game into full swing, we had a streaker on the pitch - a pint of Best that was flatter than a steamrolled pancake. Where there is usually a disc of creamy froth on top, there was a strange puddle of bubbles that looked like a map of Australia in a sea of deep red ale.

"No thanks Dickie, I prefer Guinness." Eddie's a wind-up merchant, I'm more of a conflict dodger.
"I'll give you Dickie," retorted Richey, his face growing to a hideous shade of crimson out of a combination of anger and I presume embarrassment at the fact he had just said "I'll give you Dickie" to two young men. "Stop sniggering. See that? Where's the head on that? Because I don't see a head on that. Now look. I don't care where you got this girl, I don't care how much she raked in. Get me a decent pint or I'll tell the manager you boys are fucking around on the job."

With this, we got up and filed behind the bar - not due to threats of managerial intervention, as anything Dickie says to Henry is either flat out ignored or met with raucous laughter from Henry before the door is slammed in Dickie's face. We got up because in the minds of the connoisseurs such as Dixon, paying for the company's "premium" product automatically means you're paying the alcoholic equivalent of BUPA healthcare, and should therefore be served by a veteran pint-puller, not the new kid on the block; he can say what he likes - and often does - of Eddie and myself; he can say we're stupid, lazy, incompetent, no-hopers who could well be those queers he read about in the paper (I can assure you we're not, but this doesn't stop Dickie pulling his pint to his chest whenever we're near, as if he may catch the gay from leaving his pint exposed around them; apparently it's an airborne disease). This behaviour wasn't entirely unexpected - everybody here has served an apprenticeship on the taps. If you want the hallowed task of slinging beer for a living, you've got to work hard for the respect of people you despise.

"Christine, that was amazing - but we've had a problem with -"
"What? The cask stuff? C'mon, we didn't do any of that at the Cargo Hatch, it was all alcopops and lagers. You think our demographic were chucking the bitter down their necks?"
"No, probably not," I began. "But our demographic is very fond of it. And I mean really fond. And that pint of best went out without a head on it."
"What, and he's complained?" I could sense a storm brewing, so I attempted to turn the ship around.
"Not complained, just suggested that -"
"Right, which one is it, the gray haired one with the sideburns?"
"Yes, I -"
"Oi, you, c'mere." Nope, no use trying to turn the ship around now. The iceberg got up and approached the bar, ready for trouble, as I resigned myself to going down with the ship, only to be cast as a grossly inaccurate lunatic who went bezerk when the film is made ninety years from now. "Got a problem, have you?"
"Listen to me, wench," - yeah, that's something I don't think I've mentioned before; Dickie calls women "wench", without sarcasm or irony (he also has a bad habit of burning witches and carrying a pitchfork around town) - "You may well come from some fucking ditch in the city but this isn't the city. You've come out here to a pub where the taps are to be respected. You're not pulling a pint for me until you learn some skills, and some fucking manners." Strong words indeed.
"No, I'm not. Nor are they. Enjoy that pint, Dickie." Richey looked like he was going to pop - my head fell into my hands. "It'll be your last for a while. You're banned for two weeks?"
"I'm sorry? You don't have the power to -"
"Staff have the right to ban whoever they please without consulting the manager. Get out." Eddie was grinning from ear to ear; I had gone past the nanosecond of euphoria and was already feeling the icy comedown that would inevitably occur upon Dickie's return. Dickie, looking like a sausage that had been pumped up with an industrial-strength tyre inflator, smashed his pint on the floor and ran out, muttering, wild-eyed and windswept. I did briefly wonder if he was going to get a gun, but a squealing wheel and a motor disappearing out of earshot suggested if he was going to retrieve a gun, he wouldn't be back for a few minutes anyway.

"I'm going to go and file the temporary ban report."
"There's temporary ban reports?"
"Oh yeah, I'll go through them with you later. Back in a second."

I went to get the mop and bucket, but Eddie stopped me - he came back, still giggling with glee as he gladly swabbed the deck of the good ship No Dicks (wait, no...). He was now Christine's biggest fan - while I joined his elation temporarily, I had to veto his suggestion that Dickiebaiting be added to the back of the diary.