Confessions of an Australian Bar Maid: Creature Chameleons – The Venue Duty Manager

Imagine being a manager of sorts for your own household – ensuring everyone under your roof keeps things clean, does their respective jobs, takes time out to have a break every now and then, ensure everyone is fed and watered, ensure visitors don’t overstay their welcome and leave things exactly as they found them, that someone is always answering the phone, that no undesirables cross the threshold, and so on and so forth. Kind of like a Mum!

That in a nutshell is the job of a venue duty manager. Every job that exists within a venue comes under their rule, be it bar, security, band, promoter, cleaner or driver. Everyone who’s anyone who wants anything done, answered, undone or cleaned will be looking for the duty manager. Their powers reach far and wide and must be adhered to no matter who you are.

You can spot them almost instantly in any venue. They have a 2-way radio, a pen, a sharpie, a role of gaffa tape and a bottle opener always somewhere on their person, and they walk with a look of intense concentration and determination on their face. Concentrating on the 1 million things they have to do and determined not be asked yet another stupid question by some half wit staff member or band manager about rider, dishcloths, beer taps and the like.

Depending on the scale of the event this concentration and determination may be given then chance to wane mid-evening when the band is on stage, when the punters are sufficiently distracted and boozed up and staff are having their breaks. It is in this minuscule lull that the duty manager may possibly have the chance to rest one bum cheek on a chair, half-scratch and itch they’ve had all night and inhale one tenth of a cigarette. But once the band cease to play the excitement unfolds once again as punters lose belongings or fall down stairs, tour vans demand release from garages and bar tills count up wrong again and again and again.

But once the shows over that’s it right? The duty manager is off the hook? He can go home, can he not? Oh no my friends. For with great responsibility comes many keys. Many many keys. Keys to front doors and back doors, to pool tables, and more importantly, to liquor cabinets. And there’s nothing bar staff like more than an after work staffie or 12, especially when they don’t have to lock up.

Confessions of an Australian Bar Maid: Demographical Study – Undergraduate University Students

Gone are the heady days of political protest, revolutionary rousing and experimental intoxicants in our universities. What was once a breeding ground for cutting edge ideas, social change and pioneer thinking has now been dulled to accommodate the breeding of tiresome uniformed fashion victims with a thirst for nothing but pop culture, being force fed tired old texts whilst digging themselves or Mummy and Daddy deeper into debt.

I speak totally out of turn here as I have never been to university myself. Having been in the music industry since the age of 18 it was more who-you-know than what-you-know, and I happened to fall into the right crowd. However I have been a door girl for all those years (10+ and counting – my, where does the time go…) and have been both shocked and appalled by the psyche of uni students today.

I know they’re coming before they’ve even entered the venue. It only takes one look at the sufficiently scruffy-but-styled, skinny-jeaned, lairy-shirt clad band to alert me that the undergrads are coming. And then they come full force, like an army of children dressed in old ladies clothes and 80’s knock-backs, donning fashion that screams ‘we don’t care!’ but parading around in it like a bunch of supermodels at a high-end houte-couture crack party.

Once they have been sufficiently seen and heard they make their way to me with a look of contempt and disgust.

‘Do we really have to pay?’

‘My boyfriend/brother/Mother/dog is in the band! I shouldn’t have to pay!’

‘Is there a student discount?’

‘Do we get a free drink?’

These the incessant questions of the post-pubescent waves of the future that haven’t tried to sneak their way past me without paying earning immediate expulsion from the show. Once informed there is no discount, no guests, they in fact do have to pay and it might be considered a nice thing to do to support a fellow student in their artistic endeavour, they then proceed to pay me in nothing more than silver coins and take ten years to do so. Once inside they buy one drink, sit on it for the night and ensure they there are again appropriately seen and heard, often taking no notice of the band whatsoever.

Though this demographical study is scathing and heartless at best, I admit that it is not all their fault. For years generation after generation of high school leavers have been forced into undecided and overpriced tertiary education which neither they nor their parents can afford. It’s not surprising that somewhere down the line they’ve all just given up, spat the dummy, stumbled their way through arts or communication degrees and thrown it back in our face.