Here I am getting in another post well after midnight following a bartending shift. My bar is not what you would call a Valentine’s Day destination, so after making the hell out of some pan-seared steak and a butternut & shrimp risotto for dinner (if I do say so myself), I proceeded to go in and work behind one of the only bars in Seattle that wasn’t slammed tonight.
The primary takeaway after a slow night like this one: regulars are what make my job great.
I love most parts of my job. I love making cocktails, learning more and more about spirits and drinks, and being a part of a tribe that I’ve usually experienced as generous and accommodating. Yet, it’s still my regulars that I would take with me if I could only pick one of the aspects of my job. They make my shifts worth working, especially on a slow night.
Sure, there are a small handful of folks that I wish would lose our address and never come in again, but the vast majority of the folks who visit me on a regular basis are people I plan to be friends with long after I leave my current employer, or bartending altogether. The laughs and good chats I have with these folks makes me feel damn lucky that I get paid to hang out behind a bar and make conversation.
I hope that, at whatever job you do, you have the equivalent of my regulars. At the end of the day, it’s about the people around us. A great job can get awful fast when the people around you are terrible. Likewise, an otherwise shitty job can be redeemed pretty significantly if the people we get to interact with make it so. I hope that you have people like the latter as part of your job, be they customers or coworkers or whatever.
Here’s to my regulars, who so often turn a bad night into a good one.
