Hearsay: January 2010 Archives
It has been about a year and a half since I made my living bartending, and looking back on it, tending bar made me happy. I gave it up to pursue a career in wine sales, thinking that more money and regular hours would be mine, and besides, I'd still be in "the industry". Instead, I worked around twelve hours a day, five or sometimes six days a week, and the money was about the same, except now I was paying more taxes. I stuck it out for a year, and finally realized I should have stayed in the bar. I lived, learned, and moved on.
Although it sounds clichéd, that year was a great learning experience. I learned all about the distribution side of the industry. I saw all kinds of restaurants and bars, from the smallest dives to the truly high-class establishments, and I met all the management. I learned a ton about wine. So while it turned out that a sales job wasn't for me, I can't really say I wasted my time.
In any case, I've made the decision to return to bartending. While brushing up my résumé, it occurred to me that I should probably see what my website looked like after a year or more of neglect. I found what I expected. So after much procrastination, no small amount of consideration, and hours mulling over my earlier writing, I have decided to re-launch. I've kept a few of my posts, and while this may sound like cheating, I'm going to re-date them. After all, if I'm going to all the trouble to re-launch the site, I may as well put the best foot forward in the process.
If you are reading this, I'd like to thank you for your devotion and patience. I have a lot of ideas for this site, but it would be pretty silly to start making promises this time around. I'll update when I can, and we'll leave it at that. Wish me luck, and thanks again for reading!
When I decided, at long last, that tending bar was how I wanted to spend my life, I knew that I would need a website. Mostly, I needed one to get a job. Business cards get lost a lot less than resumés, and a URL fits nicely on a business card. Plus, business cards get passed around! So my first stab at a site read like this: "Please Hire Me"! There were about five articles, selling myself as a good person and eager employee, and a page of contact information. That was it, and I got tired of it pretty fast.
Being a blogger (though somewhat sporadic about updates), I realized that a bartender's blog might not be a bad way to keep my website fresh. If you can believe it, I had not actually read ANY cocktail blogs up to that point. I was sure they had to exist so a quick google search later, I ploughed headlong into the world of bartender blogs. Thus, I hit the wall.
With so many cocktail blogs out there, written by such incredible bartenders, I was discouraged. These guys (and girls) had years of experience in the industry, a great command of the language, and some attracted so much readership that companies paid them to put ads on their sites! Discouraged is a bit of an understatement. I had just recently discovered what RSS was. How was I going to compete, or even be noticed, among these giants?! Was there anything that these guys hadn't already covered? I was tempted to just trim my site down to a literal online resume, and call it good.
Then I had the revelation that should have inspired my website from the beginning: my website is for me. If others decide to read it, that's a bonus. I started thinking about what I wanted, and from then on it became pretty clear. My website would become my dumping ground for all the knowledge and experience I would gather as a bartender. It will collect all the cocktails I discover. It will record all the tricks of the trade I pick up. It will document the lessons I learn. In short, it will chronicle the road from brand new, fresh-off-the-street bartender to tavern owner.
Armed with that decision, things started falling into place. My fiancé found movable type and set me up with it. As a former programmer, I took to it like a duck to water. I've spent the last several days getting my site to look the way I first envisioned it. There are still a few bugs I have to work out, but over all I'm pretty happy. My next step is to build a habit of posting regularly. I do plan to jump in the pool with the rest of those cocktail bloggers eventually, but for now I'm going to focus on building up some decent content, and getting enough work as a bartender to quit my day job. If you, dear reader, insist on coming along for the ride, then welcome aboard, and thanks!
