bartendJerb

Week 13 or omfg where does time go

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Work

mgbarJerb

Bartenders are riled up cos people got their schedules rearranged so we have more people on the busy times and less people on the slow times. Servers are riled up cos their hours got cut consistently cos people are lazy and leaving sidework undone. Hosts are riled up cos they’re told to communicate with bar and floor but refuse to do so. Kitchen is riled up cos executive chef sucks. Management is riled up cos we’re doing really bad on our cocktailing service and corporate is coming down hard on us because of it. I’m not riled up anymore after getting one too many talking-tos from management. We’re just annoyed people don’t want to work as a team, then complain we’re not making enough money for the job to be worth their time.

This job is literally the best-paying job I have ever had in the past ten years, including my technology jobs! I’m just surprised how most everyone treats our guests like trash, then expect those same guests to tip well.

And yeah we’re kinda done with the bad attitude. Now people get the non-committal sardonic version of ourselves.

bartendjerb

We’ve been having some issues with stocking since “floor manager quit” since we have to 1. figure out what it is we need to order then 2. Text bar manager the order that he then 3. Texts to the kitchen manager to go buy at various restaurant supply stores around town but 4. Owner gives only enough money for the kitchen guy to purchase stuff with so it’s often the bar that comes up short.

This was a really sore point over Saint Patrick’s day weekend and this lasts weekend. Bar ran out of pretty much everything and we couldn’t even make more because there was nothing to make it with.

Yesterday, when checking out of raw material stocks, we could tell someone was unhappy as we did have enough citrus juice to actually make everything we needed, for a change. Now if only they actually bought stuff we’ve been asking for months, like demerara sugar.

Between both jobs, there’s plenty of vitriol to go around.

Personal

My liver is kinda happy about it though. Same for my wallet.

One of my preferred watering spots, Iron Door Pub, shut its doors this past Sunday.

I’ve been in Minneapolis service industry for ten years.Tonight is the first time a bartender told me “I got your tab”

nullrend on Bluesky

Invited all of our coworkers to come hang out. None did. Fuck’em, last time I make an effort to socialise with them. If they want us to hangout with them we’ll just have a drink at the closest bar that’s also on the block, then going home.

Who needs sleep?

Current sleep schedule is all over the place and we’re getting tired of it. We’re thinking of rearranging our bedroom and putting up blackout curtains but we’ll need to figure out how to attach them properly to the wall without risking our rent deposit.

A more insane alternative is to move to another apartment in the same building, which would help with porch pirates.

Weather be crazy yo

In Spanish we say “Febrero loco, Marzo otro poco“. We go from blizzards to late spring warmth back to freezing then some rain and… we know global warming is real cos the weather in these latitudes doesn’t know what it wants to do anymore. This is kicking my ass and making me fall asleep early and waking up in the middle of the night and then we can’t fall back asleep.

I just want to be able to fall asleep in my building’s back courtyard and feel warm.

Government or the lack thereof

There’s just so much. Every day a new chaos. Social Security? Gutted. Department of Education? Not anymore. Secret military ops? Guess again. Meanwhile Democrats are best described by The Onion:

Chuck
Democrats Huddle To Decide How Best To Let Massive Republican Fuck-Up Slip Through Fingers

In Latin America they say “A disfrutar lo votado” (“Enjoy what you voted for”) but even if the criminal trump regime were to kill all the cruel idiots who voted for the orange cruel idiot we still have to pick up the pieces.

Good News Everyone

the classic windows xp wallpaper with your friend darth the red panda, a red panda wearing a darth vader outfit and with blue sky butterfly wings, flying above

Darth is back and it’s currently a trending topic on bluesky. They went to sleep before trending topics were even a thing.

Pretty sure that’s everything that’s rattling around in our brain… for now.

Hopefully it’ll be good on tips from here on out.

/ status report / , , , , , ,

Here be what’s went on with us this past week. We got our asses kicked.

Work

  • bartendJerb is basically gone. Business levels have dropped below what’s sustainable for the place mid-term, but management won’t adjust labor, nor menu, nor open hours. They keep waiting for the weather to get cold. Guess what! It’s cold now! And it’s still slow!
  • mgbarJerb: Getting ever busier. We don’t think the corpos expected our location to come out swinging this hard, and yet here we are; getting no support from them while they try to tell us how to do our jobs. There is no institutional knowledge at the corporate level and they don’t provide mechanisms to keep it at the location level. Very little of the two weeks-long training I went through has actually been useful.

Personal

We got mamasha, our storage server, back online. She was offline for nearly three months cos we didn’t have to deal with an entire failed raidz2 pool. But it’s back online and so far, no issues. I have a bit more to say on this since a well-administered ZFS pool is not supposed to fail like this but here we are, restoring from a backup made two years ago, right before I mostly lost sentience.

Today the criminal president-elect announced 25% tariffs on all products coming from Mexico, Canada, and China. Better start a garden so you can have tomatoes, avocados, lettuce and jalapeños (they come from Mexico). If you’re building a house, you need to have your contractors finish ASAP (most lumber is imported from Canada). If you need electronics, you need to buy them now. Service industry will see the price of tequila, mezcal, beer (Modelo, Pacifico, XX Lager) go up.

Myself I’m starting the build-out process for a new storage server. mamasha’s hardware is from 2012 (Xeon E3-1220 V2, SuperMicro X9SCM-F) with the motherboard already getting replaced once. It’d be nice to have something with just as many PCI-E slots so we can put a nice GPU and see what’s what with self-hosted LLM tooling. We don’t condone the use of genAI for artistic purposes but that’s where tech is going so we need to learn how to deal with it even if it’s from an adversarial standpoint.

Bringing this server back online was my win of the week. We’ll take it.

Learning

We need to start learning new stuff. Picked up a copy of Meehan’s Bartender Manual and honestly we think it is helping us understand more about bartending as a profession.

Today we think we’ll go to the library and renew our library card. If it all goes to shit in the US it’d be useful to know another language. German, French or Czech would be nice.

Rebuilt our nextcloud VM since it died when out zpool crashed. It’s been okay to re-learn all of these things, the first time I configured the VM we didn’t keep much in the way of notes.

Speaking of notes… we’re now using obsidian instead of vim+wiki.vim. We don’t spend that much time on our workstation anymore and we need our notes available on the phone without having to fiddle on the command line on the phone. It’s a pain in the ass honestly.

Intersections

Now, on the intersection of work and personal… my phone scrobbles to last.fm whatever songs are being played in my environment. INXS is picking up steam as it is on the playlist at mgbarJerb.

They are also starting to push hard on the Christmas music and that’s going to be messy; had the displeasure of listening to an EDM remix of little drummer boy. Just… no.

This week we get an additional day off because of Thanksgiving. From here until the end of the year it’ll be madness at work.

So much thinking to be done ugh

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So. The fucken orange idiot won the election:

  • Department of Education: To be closed, or as close to that as possible.
  • Abortion: Likely to be made illegal via FDA prohibition of abortion drugs and Comstock Act.
  • Kakistocrats taking over government functions. See who is getting picked to the orange idiot’s cabinet.
  • Immigration: Paths are going to get completely blocked off. And they’re talking about getting rid of Jus soli and switching to Jus sanguinis. Also, deporting millions of people. Doesn’t matter if you’re citizen, resident, or illegal. If you’re not white, you’re going.
  • Economy: Accelerationists are going to take over and they fully plan to crash the economy to achieve their societal aims.
  • Whatever it is they decide to fuck up next. Go read about Project 2025 to find out. You’re not going to like it.

For the past week we’ve been considering our options and we don’t have a lot of leeway— our savings were considerably sapped by large purchases for family and my own period of unemployment from August to October. We have just enough to get out with a large bag and that is dependent on us being able to afford to get out.

I don’t want to start over yet again, for the nth time in our lives. We have much to consider in the next month. Then comes the execution of whatever plans we come up with.

While we grapple with my personal facts, a whole lot of magaots are now realizing how badly they’re about to get fucked by the person they voted for. They’ll cry and they’ll moan and they’ll want for rescue but… what’s done is done. Fuck their feelings.

That was the big thing. Now for the usual things:

  • bartendJerb: Slowly picking up now that the weather has turned colder. It’s not nearly as cold as it should be. No idea how well the cocktails I came up with are selling, no one tells me numbers of any sort. I don’t think anyone knows numbers of any sort anyways.
  • mgbarJerb: It’s picking up steam and a lot of our staff still haven’t gotten it through their heads we are a high-volume craft cocktail and they need to fucken move. We don’t have the staffing levels they have at Bar La Grassa, much less that level of service.
  • Reading: Re-reading Meehan’s Bartender Manual to understand better what the fuck it is they want us to do at mgbarJerb.

I’ve mostly cut out twitter out of my social posting as most of those circles have moved over to bluesky, with twitter itself cratering even further down that it was before; still keep a browser window open to the site but it’s mostly for reading, not for posting. Been pruning a lot of my RSS feeds to cut out a lot of stuff we don’t follow anymore. Also! we rejiggered MariaDB on this server and hopefully OOM-killer will leave it alone from now on.

We also wanted to build a new server to replace our aging storage server hardware but… it depends on what we decide to do given the economy situation around this here parts.

The last bit we need to do is figure out a way to get us to sleep at a decent hour. We’ve been going to sleep with the first light of the sun and… we’ve missed out on overtime at work due to us not being awake to actually take the shifts. This post is one of those actions we’re taking since it’s keeping us awake past the usual sleep window.

The long slow painful backroad to renewed sentience

/ status report / , , , ,

It’s been a busy week over here:

  • bartendJerb: I was non-ceremoniously put in charge of the winter drinks menu. The previous-previous bar manager neglected to leave his builds behind so… we got to come up with new ones. We think there are two good cocktails, two decent cocktails, and one iffy cocktail. But they’re done and mostly ready for launch barring ingredient availability. Yellow chartreuse is not cheap.
  • mgbarJerb: It is having new-restaurant issues that we personally thought would not happen at all given it is a corporate rim enterprise with many other venues all over the United States. And yet we keep having logistics issues all over the damn place. Also, la barra fue diseñada con las nalgas (designed with the ass cheeks. Pencil held between them). But hopefully we’ll be able to implement changes that will make life easier for our barbacks and our servers.
  • bistroJerb: Gossip says they’re looking for another bar manager. It will be their fifth of this year— just this year. That’s in addition to the slow season coming up for them. The temperature dropped a solid 35 °F from yesterday. The joint is supposed to be featured on a tv show one of these days and bistroBoss is hanging all of his hopes on the business picking up for the business because of it.

All in all it has been busy and we are making money after taking a li’l menty break hiatus over the summer. Our big expense has been going out to eat and drink but we are currently in the process of reconstructing our kitchen space so we can actually cook at volume. The lack of counter space once again comes in to haunt us in our tiny little galley kitchen but… it is much better than the lame tiny space we used to live before.

Slowly we regain the ability to concentrate and think. We lost that for a long, long time. We fucked up a lot of things during that time.

Going to try and do these reports to myself more often. They help to keep track of dates and events.

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