I was recently reminiscing with my sister, Gabrielle, about jobs we’d had when we were younger.
Thinking now about some of them, I don’t know how I had the energy or the patience back then. But I suppose that’s the path most of us have to take – we pay our dues so we can live in splendour later on … although I’ve yet to realise the latter. They are always such cheery reads, these news articles about how people are living longer and many will have to accept that they’ll be working well into their 70s in order to make ends meet. Gee, d’you think? My utilities bills alone will have me waiting tables into my dotage.
“Sorry, sonny, can you speak up? Did you say you wanted a Coke or cake?”
When we were teenagers, we had summer or weekend jobs to enhance any pocket money we got from our parents. We had no broken toilet or car transmission woes at that age; it was all about buying things we wanted. The late David Foster took on a whole team of us as Foster’s cashiers. I and several of my friends signed up for the dream of getting an actual, bona fide pay cheque at the end of each week.
This was back when you had to manually type all the prices into the register, and your fingers had better fly on Saturdays, the Thursday before Easter weekend or any time there was a possible hurricane threat.
Speaking of prices, once in a while we’d be handed a pricing gun and have to make our way along the shelves, stickering each and every item with a label. The jars, boxes and packaged loaves of robust bread were pretty easy to handle, but the awkwardly shaped stuff could be a challenge. The sticker might not adhere to the whole surface, so then you’d have to adjust each one with your fingers. Two hours of that seemed like an eternity.
Now I’m a shopper, as much as I’m not always a fan of the bar code/scanning system – simply because goods aren’t always sitting exactly above their price designations – it has to be a huge blessing for the staff. I wonder if the day the scanning system officially went online, a funeral pyre of pricing guns burned brightly in the back parking lot.
As much as we earned decent money at that time, the bag boys were raking it in. Almost every customer tipped them, so on a busy day they’d be coming to us on the hour to convert their bulging pockets of quarters into notes.
This was also the time – and I don’t know why it was phased out, just one day it wasn’t happening any more – when they would sometimes push the carts full of groceries to the customers’ cars and help put all the bags in the boot. Makin’ it rain, I tell ya. The little scamps wore more gold jewellery than we could ever afford.
When I got older, I was hosting comedy clubs and singing with bands, plus I had a full-time job in the weekdays. Going to bed late, getting up early … it wasn’t that difficult in my 20s. Now, I’d need two days to recover.
Then I started emceeing karaoke nights. No greater definition of ‘a mixed bag’ than those gigs. The ones at Hard Rock Cafe in town were terrific. I had a steady group of regulars and the majority of them were decent singers, although you’d always get the odd ‘ungifted’ performer.
Hey, not everyone can carry a tune in a bucket, but the killer is when those not touched with talent choose songs like ‘My Heart Will Go On’, ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ and ‘Broken Wing’, et al. I would barely have sat down before the sheaf of such requests hit the table, which would then have to be spaced out as much as possible so drinking audience members didn’t wrap up their tabs early.
We had some great karaoke competitions at that venue, and the staff became like family. A lot of the time, that’s what fun about these jobs – the camaraderie that comes with them.
Other karaoke bookings were hit and miss. You’d have a restaurant manager that wanted to try something different to get more punters in. Nothing wrong with that, but karaoke wasn’t always the best choice because – to an extent – it wasn’t controlled entertainment.
A sports bar that decided to give it a go was an uphill battle from the start. As soon as I began to set up, I was eyed with suspicion by construction workers that went there daily after work to relax and share some beers with buddies. I just had this sense that announcing, “Right! Who’s up for a song? Who’d like to get up first and give us a tune?” was not going to be welcome.
That, along with asking the staff to turn off the air hockey (which was directly behind me) and to please kill the light over the pool table (lest I get the back end of a enthusiastic cue lining up for a shot rammed into my stomach), was clearly only going to exacerbate my lack of popularity. But I’d been hired to do a job, and surely the manager had done their research and asked all the regulars if they would welcome karaoke, to which they must have replied, “Oh, yes please! At last, our prayers have been answered!”
What followed was a pretty brutal few weeks of disgruntled faces, barely any volunteers, a drunken office party with one of the employees jumping up on the pool table to scream a song, and staff so sympathetic that a conveyor belt of free drinks came my way throughout each night. Rather than bringing extra business through the doors, the bar’s loyal customers threatened to self-excommunicate if they had to face further weeks of caterwauling. The hammer came down not long after, and I’ve never been so happy to lose a booking.
One of my longest stints was hosting once a week at resorts in East End. Looking back, I can’t believe I did that for years. And the locations for my setup at the properties weren’t always the easiest to reach. The simplest was carrying the speakers through the lobby to either the indoor or outdoor bar, but then someone thought having the entertainment upstairs would be better, which involved two flights of stairs. I had to carry it all up, put it together, host the night, then bring it all down again. I lived on West Bay Road, so add a two-hour round trip to the equation and it was a commitment.
Next, they wanted to move it to a deck that could only be accessed via the beach. There were plans to install a wooden path over the sand, but before that happened it was months of lifting everything over my head and trudging over a deep, soft, finely ground sloping surface to the venue. Karaoke CrossFit. I dreaded it, but I did it.
As much as I would never want to go back to those long nights, I’m really glad I had the experience. I think the old-timers call them ‘life lessons’. Whether it was learning how to deal with difficult customers, or recognising when it was time for the fat lady to sing at a sports bar, it was an education.
And hey – if the house bills keep going up as they are, I may have the chance to revisit those good times all over again.
“Okay, up next we’ve got Steve. Is Steve here? ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’? No, please put your drink down. You can’t bring your drink on stage. I’m not giving you the mic until you do it. Well, then, I guess you’re not singing.”
Yeah … sign me up.
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