Saturday 27 February 2010

Tales of an Australian Bar Maid: Creature Chameleons

The main stayers as far as venue workers go are bartenders and security guards as you’re either running to them or away from them. But there are many other facets to working in a venue or nightclub, giving a Creature of the Night various faces. In Creature Chameleons we will explore these many faces.


THE CLOAKROOM MASTER

One of the less glamorous jobs in a venue some people like cloakroom as its not always busy and you can hide under a myriad of bags and coats when hung over. However the cloakroom can be, depending on the weather, either very boring or very busy, and is often used as a form of punishment if a staff member is always late, slow, annoying the manager, etc.

In the beginning the cloakroom is tolerable as punters filter in, receive their numbered tickets and entrust you with their belongings. The middle of the night then consists of pleasant visits from crowd and staff alike chatting and checking up on you as you may be about to die of boredom. This mid-show lull ensures you either bring a good book or are hopefully paired with someone interesting or it can turn out to be a very long night.

And then they come. The end of show advance of thousands of inebriated revellers all wanting their things and all wanting them now. Reinforcements are brought in, as the little room that was once so orderly now becomes a flurried mess of discarded coat hangers and coat check ticket http://sistersin-creaturesofthenight.blogspot.com/s. You become a machine, grabbing tickets in exchange for belongings. But take heed the poor souls that lose their tickets. Should they remember the ticket number and item they cloaked they escape a look that could kill and a good dressing down. But if they lose their ticket and can’t remember the number there’s a slight pang of sympathy as they’re told they must wait till the end of the flurry to recover their goods.

Once the queue is up and the ticket losers have pleaded for mercy and collected their lot the clean up of tickets and hangers begins, along with the cataloguing of items lost or left behind. This is always my favourite part of the cloakroom, as those things not collected within the month are then seized by staff, and I must thank the people of Sydney and London for some mighty fine wardrobe acquisitions over the years.


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