Opinion

My relatives will be glad I’m no longer a bartender and back to unemployed

I’ve spent the past five months doing nothing but making money, and I have €700 in my bank account to show for it

Of all the jobs, bartending was the best. I only cried twice. But a bartender can’t be anything else. Photograph: iStock
Of all the jobs, bartending was the best. I only cried twice. But a bartender can’t be anything else. Photograph: iStock
Rivkah McKinley
Wed Oct 12 2022 - 05:00

I’ve given myself one week to find an alternative to the service industry and failing that, as I always do, I’ll be back down Camden Street with a stack of CVs, all dolled up in high heels and a push-up bra. I know my own strengths — my legs, mostly, and a desire to please. (Once employed, I revert to items more suitable for these scarcely habitable northern climes — namely, men’s clothing.)

Though, in fact, I think I got my last job out of compassion. Instead of being asked if I had the minimal 15 years’ experience required to tilt a glass while the beer goes into it, I was told the job was p**s-easy and hired on the spot. I knew I was in a good place. I made friends with my colleagues and the regulars, my favourite of whom was so depressed we could chat all day. I was physically and mentally exhausted, but enjoying people, unable to enjoy anything else.

But then my managers left and a new one arrived. And last Thursday, I left too. At the end of my tether, I asked for a raise: I wanted to make the same as the men doing my job. I was told I made less not because I was a woman but because I was the least hardworking. While I’m generally a no pain, no gain kind of person, insofar as I believe in neither, in this case the claim was untrue. We fought until it was unclear whether I’d resigned or been fired, but it was clear that it was over. I realised I couldn’t go straight to the dole office because I’d told an almost identical story last time. Besides, I crave respect. People pretend to respect you on the dole, but they never do — they’re too jealous. I end up paranoid and reclusive on the dole. Albeit happy. My happiest.

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A lovely man called Brendan from jobs services used to call me once a month. He spoke to me with sincerity and love, communicating only care and sympathy for my plight. “I don’t see why you can’t do a bit of teaching, I think that would be a much nicer job for you.” “What, 20k and two years for a teaching qualification? This is why I just can’t talk to your generation about these things.”

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I appreciated, though, his devotion to keeping me out of the service industry, a devotion rivalling only my own. “And you absolutely won’t consider that starting position at Facebook? Sometimes you just have to do what you can to make your life easier.”

“Under no circumstances. I’d rather die. I’d rather live with my parents. I’d rather … I just wish I could be a doctor. Or an actress. Or an actress playing a doctor.” (I watched a lot of ER back then). Of course, I ended up back in the service industry and Brendan just had to let me go, like the ER doctors sometimes watch heroin addicts walk away, blissfully ignorant of why heroin might be a better option.

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I did try to be an underqualified English language teacher for a while in France where my master’s in literature from Oxford was enough. But the children just danced on the tables, there were noise complaints and my cowardly teaching methods (infinite kindness) were discovered. I worked as an administrator for a music school but I was always typing the wrong numbers into the machine, and those numbers were money. Had I known I was on camera, of course, I wouldn’t have taken so many naps. I was a nanny, I gave loving words to upper middle class children who bit me and left me bruised, and I still dream of them sometimes, tiny girls who struck me as extremely frightened little animals.

Of all the jobs, bartending was the best. I only cried twice. But a bartender can’t be anything else. In 45 hours of shifts, you use a week’s worth of energy. In winter you get no sunlight at all. The last party I was at was my own, months ago, and no one came because it was a Tuesday. I’ve spent the past five months doing nothing but making money, and I have €700 in my bank account to show for it.

“I could be a house cleaner?” I call to my boyfriend. “Absolutely not,” he says, with the kind of unexpected papa bear strictness he takes on sometimes when he doesn’t get my jokes immediately . I call my dad for advice, but he just makes sceptical grumbling noises, and at the end of the call tells me he was happy to help. My mother is so insistent that they would surely hire me at the London Review of Books that I have to hold the phone at arm’s length and hide under my bed. Other people’s advice will always be wrong, of course, because other people can’t ever understand what exactly you want. Perils of individualism. That, and the difficulty of getting a loan.

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My relatives will be glad I’m no longer a bartender and back to unemployed (it feels less “poor” to them). “Why do you want a job?” my mum says. “Jobs are awful. I can always make you your dinner.” My boyfriend has a slightly nervous look in his eyes — a “not this again” look. One housemate is concerned, the other frustrated. My younger brother offers to pull strings at places where he’s been a bouncer, my older brother is sympathetic, sensitive and vague. My father just thinks. And thinks. But I don’t know what he’s thinking about.

Thus far, the lesson of my life has been that the things I say only get me fired. But it’s not like I’ll learn to shut up. Camden Street, here I come.

Rivkah McKinley is a writer