Alcoholiday.

You know, just between you and me, sometimes I do wonder if the company knows the truth about this blog, and the truth about yours truly. Whether my continuous attempts to distort my identity and the identity of the pub have been in vain as the upper echelons of "management" follow my actions to the letter and exact their revenge upon me accordingly, sending wave upon wave of actors to both put me through my paces and provide me with an almost endless supply of material. Whether the company has a file an inch thick, keeping track of my every movement, keeping a close eye on who is who, what events are being described, much the same way most people can be traced to within a couple of feet by interpol.

"Sir, he's written another entry," says a henchman as he enters the chairman's office, complete with a stack of papers containing my latest chapter. "This time concerning the headquarters!"
"Good, good," cackles an ominous Bond-villain type as he strokes a siamese cat with his hook and adjusts his eyepatch. "Send the minibus of primary school teachers! And make sure they all say the chips taste like shit!" And lo, not two days later, I am met with a surprisingly belligerent group of educators who all scream blue murder about our (perfectly good, I might add) chips.

Whether or not I am actually being watched by the company I will probably never know, at least not until the court summons comes crashing through the door or I am vanished by a group of hired goons on my way home one night - although I must assume I am being punished for something, as despite my best efforts, my ruthless efficiency, my brutal ID checking policy and my willingness to come into work no matter what the situation, I have once again been relegated to the morning shift for the week. Which, this week, meant one thing - I would be manning the bar for the Bank Holiday Monday lunchtime slot. Try as I might, I just couldn't shift that shift - and rightly so; no matter what the bribe, what I offered to people in exchange for my Bank Holiday Monday freedom, it was something nobody in their right mind would want. It's like going around and saying "hey, do you want this gigantic, back-breakingly cumbersome bag of crap? I'll swap it for your small, manageable bag of crap." Negotiating from weakness - never an easy prospect at the best of times.

"Why do you want to get rid of it? You're on double time." A good question.
"Well swap with me then." Then comes the look of suspicion, then the look of horror as they remember previous bank holiday Monday lunchtimes.
"Get fucked."

Fair enough. I can't - and don't - blame them.

Bank holiday Monday for everybody else is a bit of free time, a day off work, a day to spend as they please - go to the park, the pub, whatever. Unless, of course, you happen to work in the pub, because then your bank holiday is spent beating back the hordes of fair-weather punters with a stick as everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. If everyone's drinking bitter, the barrel will run dryer than the Sahara, bringing about the lengthy process of changing one barrel for another and disposing of the slack that lurks at the bottom of each fresh receptacle. If everyone's playing darts, the bulb above the oche will go. If everyone's after a bowl of chips, there'll be a potato famine - that kind of thing. Everyone sits outside, whether they're smoking or not, so while it appears quiet on the inside, there are dozens of people outside freezing their knackers off because if it's not raining, they have to sit outside (a very British compulsion, it would seem - the undying urge to be outside regardless of whether or not it's actually a good idea). Then they decide they want food - although they don't decide in dribs and drabs; a collective urge grabs them as they lurch inside like a gang of mindless zombies, menus in hand, trying to order their own weight in food. But of course, everybody has questions - now, seeing as we don't have waiters or waitresses at this time of day, I've had to get my waiter bit down to a fine art. I mean, it really has to be seen to be believed - in the time it takes me to get across to a table I can remove any and all trace of bile and disgust from my voice and body language and really give the old politeness thing an earnest shot. But before I can take the food out, the people first have to decide what they would like, and obviously that can lead to a series of questions as to the content of some of our dishes, and seeing as most of the time I'm the head waiter by default, all questions fall on me. From the Scotsmen who came in demanding - not asking, demanding - grilled ham and mustard sandwiches while grilling me on the origin of the ham to the old woman who wanted to know if she could have the sausage and mash without the sausage and with extra mash, it would seem that our menu falls spectacularly short of the expectations of our main clientele; the mentally disturbed (and the Scottish). Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't ask questions when going for a meal, of course I'm not - because some people have legitimate dietary concerns or they don't like this, that, or the other, but if you need to know what kind of oil we use in our fryers to the point where I need to go and look at the name of the brand on the tin (all because of your asinine theory that chips fried in certain oils taste better than others - they're fried chips, we buy them in bags so huge that it requires several men to lift them; this isn't Fugu), you're obviously in the wrong place.

So, as per usual, the light coming through the windows was obliterated by the shadows of the walking unfed, stumbling in from outside to order food by the bucketful, undoubtedly armed with questions so specific they would make Magnús Magnússon spin in his grave like a rotisserie chicken. As I braced myself for the worst, the staff door swung open and Christine barged in. A surprise to say the least.

"Right, I've done all the line checks for this week - is there much food going?" I had forgotten Christine was here, hidden away in the stock house counting bags of crisps; she is helping Henry with his stock keeping and the like, as she did at her previous pub, and had now become tired of that and decided to do a bit of front-of-house.
"Probably."
"Right, you do the bar, I'll do the food."

And just like that, I was given a reprieve. We both fielded as many questions as we could about the food and sent twenty meals through before instructing everybody else to wait twenty minutes. As the protests were muffled by the staff door slamming behind us, we got to work helping Elaine cook it all. As the least experienced chef in the room, I was assigned the job of cooking the easiest meal of the lot - the soup starter. No problem. After being ejected from the kitchen for leaving the metal spoon in the soup upon putting it in the microwave, I was left to man the bar; while it wasn't ridiculous, it was enough to keep me going until I heard an awful racket from the corridor - I went to investigate only to find Christine trying to kick the staff door clear off its hinges with five plates in each hand.

"Get the doors." I went through and wedged each door open, providing a clear path to the outside area.

"Do you want me to bring some through?"
"Nah, it's alright, I've got another five and that's it." I wasn't entirely convinced - she seemed stressed, and I thought it might be an idea to at least offer a hand.
"Well do you want me to -"
"Honestly, it's under control. I live and breathe this shit." And I believed her. The poor woman was obviously disturbed. As somebody who has survived a few years behind one of the single most financially lucrative spots in the whole of Wales, she certainly seemed to thrive on pressure, be it real or imagined. I was once like her; dashing from customer to customer, at some points literally sprinting between drinks. That was before the now-canonical Christmas Eve debacle, during which I was blessed with an epiphany; the drinks will only pour as fast as their respective nozzles will allow, there is no point getting stressed out about something as trivial as pouring somebody a drink. But considering her almost superhuman abilities, she still hadn't turned her stress dials down to country pub levels - Superman toned it down to live as Clark Kent; he didn't go flying to work, snapping pencils as he sat around with his pants over his trousers. No, he put on a pair of glasses and conceded that polite society would not allow pants over trousers as he walked to work. Although after a few meals, not even kryptonite could have calmed Christine down. My customer service statement has a lot in common with jazz music - relaxed, easy going, perpetuated by people with no real ambition in life. But Christine was, by her very way of being, making me as anxious, stressed and jumpy as she was - she was the Slayer to my Dave Brubeck Quartet, the Metallica to my Mogwai, and I didn't like it one little bit. I try very hard to bring an overall ambient atmosphere to the workplace and in she comes, kicking the door open, running around and totally laying waste to my attempts to put a calm face on stress-free productivity.

Not only that, but if somebody's running around like a lunatic, it instantly makes anybody else in the vicinity look comatose by comparison; I could literally see some people thinking "look at that lazy bastard, letting that poor woman run around like that". But here's the thing - I was doing just as much as she was. Just because she had an extremely physically exhausting way of getting from A to B didn't mean she was getting there faster than I was, as often she wasn't. So while she was jumping around like a flea on speed trying to juggle fifty plates at once, I was left to collect glasses, wash them, and then fill them with overpriced beer and half-baked conversation. Conversation is an optional service we provide; it costs nothing and can be requested at any time. However, some people talk with you, and some talk at you; and as I saw a gigantic, vinyl-decal-plastered van skid to a halt in the car park, I knew those services would be put through a rigorous test until it was time for me to go home, as for the next few hours I would have to juggle the usual requirements of the job with the added burden of listening to Frank.

Frank comes in on the weekends with a wallet full of fifties, a shaved head (which, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that his hairline is retreating back across his head faster than you can say sacré bleu) and what he perceives to be impeccable dress sense - Frank is obsessed, to the very core, with the way others perceive him; and when he discovers that you, in fact, don't spend hours in Marks & Spencers making sure your shirts match your shoes, he will advise you - in one way, he is a Stella-drinking loudmouth who fancies himself as Vinnie Jones (case in point - not three weeks ago, I was been asked for my two cents in a discussion on the favoured method of "nutting some twat because they grabbed your missus' arse") and in quite another, he is the pub's equivalent of Trinny and Susannah, with his scathing observations coming in the cunning guise of some two-bit bricklayer who doesn't know his arse from his elbow. And the bank holiday is no exception to this. One pint of Stella in, and I turn around to see Frank looking me up and down.

"You alright, Frank?"
"How tall are you, fella?" I tell him - I wouldn't say I'm freakishly tall (parents on bus stops don't tell their children to stop pointing and staring at the gigantic man, for instance), but I'm tall enough that it doesn't matter where I stand at concerts, that kind of tall.
"Yeah, you need some new threads - that shirt's doing nothing for you. You need something to accentuate your height." I let out a chuckle - was that humour from Frank? My gosh, I think it was. Either that, or - nope, maybe not then.
"Frank, this is the company uniform," I said, pointing at the gigantic logo emblazoned on the shirt.
"Sure, sure," - from a shake of the head and a raise of the eyebrow, I could see that he evidently disagreed with me; the company obviously provided me with an Armani suit, which I promptly burned before stealing my current attire from the back of some company-sponsored tramp (that's why I thought he was joking; the company logo couldn't be more obvious if it let out a high-pitched siren and had a flashing light around it). "Have you got £200?"
"What?" I almost took this as a sleight - I know that we're famously ill-compensated for our efforts but really.
"Come out with me, I'll sort you out." I dreaded to think what Frank had in mind. "£200 and you'll have a lovely bit of wardrobe going on, a few nice suits, some decent shoes, the works." I've actually got some half-decent clothes, surprisingly, but...
"I wouldn't be able to wear them to work, Frank - do you dress like that when you go to work?" A rhetorical question - Frank will often pop in between jobs in the week in his work attire - an aging, stained football strip sponsored by a company that has long since gone into liquidation, and trousers that are now primarily made of cement and plaster instead of cloth - which couldn't be less glamorous if it was simply a burlap pair of bundies tastefully offset by a waste bag waistcoat.
"I dress smart when I'm going to give estimates. That's why I'm a success - first impressions count." He even left a pause so that you could mentally complete the sentence; "that's why I'm a success... and you're a loser." Burn.
"How do you know I'm not a snappy dresser outside of all this? How do you know that when the hops-stained rags are thrown off at the end of the day, I don't turn into Raul Julia?" Don't ask me why, but I've always considered Raul Julia (especially as Gomez Addams) to be the height of suave. Needless to say, should I ever make my millions I will spend almost all my times in a smoking jacket, in a rusty old mansion playing the Street Fighter games continuously.
"Who?" Ugh. "Look, first impressions are worth a million dollars. £200's worth it if it gets you the client's undivided attention." I think Frank sometimes forgets that around here, it is very much the other way around - the clientele here tug at my line of sight like a pack of hyperactive children, I don't need to "wow" anybody or twist their arm to get them to buy beer.

This is another part of Frank's 'bit' - business tips. Doesn't matter what your business is, Frank's undoubtedly done it a hell of a lot better than you ever will, and he'll be good enough to impart his wisdom upon you whether you like it or not.

"What do you want out of life, mate?" He asks me this every couple of weeks, so after a few months of getting the same advice on how to become a writer for a living (I decided against following Frank's advice - "write a book and pay for it yourself, and if it doesn't sell in the shops, don't act like you're too good to get on down the boot sales", he said, no doubt reminiscing about Dan Brown's incredibly successful car boot sale tour the prior year - not only because it was advice so wretchedly hideous it's a wonder I wasn't turned to stone by even listening to it, but because we later received a cheque from Frank in which he promised to pay us eghtie [sic] pounds and seventy four pense [sic], leading me to believe his much-hyped autobiography was very much a work in progress) I began to get his advice on more "specialist careers" - and, to his credit, he had advice for all of them.

"Lion taming? Awfully dangerous game that; you need to get your reflexes up to scratch." At this point, he threw a very small box of matches at me as a means of testing my skills against a 500lb lion. He missed by a country mile. "Yeah, good. You're on your way. Now, you want to start writing to the circuses, because let me tell you, I'd imagine they're always on the lookout for lion tamers."

Stuff like that. Of course the advice always comes back to "how to wow the client", and this week was no exception.

"All you have to do is just sit there and listen to what they have to say," hypothesized Frank, presumably in an attempt to wow the judges of the National Hypocrite Of The Year awards, who - unbeknownst to me - must have been in the room at the time. "Let them have their say, and then take that and tell them what you're going to do. Just totally wash over them, and they'll take what you say as red because they think you've taken what they've said on board."

But before Frank could go on to tell me about all the old women he smarmily seduces in an attempt to win more business for his extremely suss construction racket, Christine emerged from the kitchen and approached me, clutching me from the jaws of Frank's 'tips'.

"Well, it's all sorted now, forty meals and no hiccups - I've got to get back to my food stock now, there's a few dishes left to do so if you get a minute, you couldn't give them a rinse before putting them in the dishwasher, could you?" An extremely reasonable request, I'm sure you'll agree; literally all I had to do was turn the tap on full blast and literally powerwash the blobs of sauce, puddles of OAP saliva and lumps of undigested mash off the plates before bunging them in the dishwasher and forgetting about them, a process that takes all of three minutes. As I went to go, Frank called me back.

"See, I'd take that as... disrespect." Frank had ingested a few Stellas by this point; they don't call it Wifebeater for nothing, and seeing as Frank doesn't have a wife to go home and clout to compensate for his shortcomings, he instead commits vulgar assaults on the intelligence of anyone and everyone within earshot of his ludicrious assertions. "Let me tell you summat, some bloke disrespected my missus once." His 'missus', of course, refers to this one poor lass named Amanda - about whom we all know an almost stalkerish amount of information thanks to Frank's long-winded monologues - whom Frank 'dated' for three months, four years ago. Here's why that relationship didn't work:

First date: The old favourite, the UCI - Amanda wanted to see light-hearted Myers outing Cat In The Hat; Frank wanted to see two-hour shitfest Matrix Revolutions. Like a true gentleman, Frank paid for Amanda to go and see Cat In The Hat - on her own - while he went to watch 120 action-packed minutes of pseudo-spiritual arsewater with a few fights thrown in for good measure. He also gave her £20 for a taxi, as her film finished half an hour after his and he couldn't be bothered waiting for her.

Second date: Badminton. Frank "battered" her 7-0, and had to think very carefully about inviting her to join his team.

Third date: Amanda procured two tickets to see The Woman In Black at a Swansea theatre, a chilling and masterfully-executed bit of theatre that people from all walks of life can enjoy; Frank instead went to see Matrix Revolutions again because he didn't understand it the first time.

Relationship over. Anyway...

"Some bloke disrespected my missus once, so you know what I did?"
"Took him to see Matrix Revolutions?" Frank never listens to anyone but himself so you can say pretty much whatever you want to him. He's the proverbial gorilla with bananas in his ears.
"I found out where he worked - he worked at MFI, right?"
"Right."
"So I went up there and I fucking smacked him one, right in the paint aisle." I could picture it, and for some reason I found the picture extremely disheartening (if it was indeed true) - this man had probably done nothing, but because of Frank's idea that everyone but him is some sort of sexual predator, he got beaten black and blue between the tins of lavender and mint. "I thought I'd get picked up by CCTV and be arrested... nope. Nothing."
"What, are you suggesting I hit her?"
"No, just... I dunno, fuck about with her car or something."
"But how did she disrespect me?"
"Interfering with the discussions of men."

Solid advice there - women belong in the kitchen, men belong in the bar with the right to "fuck about with your car" if you don't like it. This may be another reason why Frank's 'missus' wasn't his missus for very long.

"Who the hell was that?" Christine, it would seem, is yet to meet the full cavalcade of scumbags this place has to offer. I do feel bad for her - while I can piss and moan all I like about being moved from the night shift from the morning shift, she went from running one of the country's busiest establishments to festering away behind the scenes of one of the company's "development" gaffs, a place that more than likely will not still be in business in fifty years, as the regulars either move away or die and the demand for an old-fashioned country pub eventually fades to nothing while her old pub, The Cargo Hatch, will more than likely go from strength to strength, with or without her.
"Oh, that's just Frank."
"I don't think it can get any worse - it can't, can it?"
"Nah." I didn't want to tell her about Lloyd until it was absolutely necessary. She can discover him (and his profoundly worrying theories regarding religion, homosexuality and the impending judgement day that has been "nigh" for as long as he's been coming to the pub) for herself, just like everyone else did.

As Christine counted the very last of the salted nuts and I powershowered the last of the accumulated pool of dribble and vinegar from the soiled stack of plates, Christine was relieved of her duties by Henry as I returned to the bar. That is, until she came back in, face crumpled up.

"What's the matter?"
"Has one of you got a footpump or something? One of my tyres has gone flat."

I swung round, finger ready pointed, but Frank had gone - I went out to see Christine's car (obviously Christine's - it was the only other car in the staff parking zone, and Henry's car is a bright red Punto) slightly depressed on one side with an emptied pint of Stella on the adjacent bench. Fantastic.

"Here you go," Henry mumbled as he handed me a small footpump that looked like it could barely power an accordian. Noting my disgust, he answered my question before I could ask it - "I've got a bad back. I'll watch the bar. Here's those papers you wanted."

As I got to work with Henry's footpump, I actually welcomed the chance to have some time away from the bar - for the first time all day, I too was free to sit outside and have some time to myself. Time I used to really put my writing skills to good use - filling out Frank's company ban report.