Boston Sucks - A Tuesday Night Illustration

A friend of mine was in town from NYC the other night; we did our usual bar hopping jaunt that's been the automatic plan for over a decade now.

First stop was Union Street in Newton. It's actually a pretty good place to go - has a vast menu of bar food, it's recently renovated, plenty big enough to find some space, and overall the closest thing around to a modern, Manhattan-style bar.

BUT, we stood there for 5 minutes waiting for someone to wipe down an empty table right in front of us. Then the personality-deficient waitress made us wait 15 minutes before we got a beer. Thus we only had time for one drink and dinner. Had we had decent service, we'd have drank twice as much. These bar owners/managers outside of NYC, Philly, and a few other cities, are so clueless about what is and isn't good business practice. The lost sales due to unnecessarily slow service really add up.

For one thing, waitresses and bartenders up here have no pep and seemingly hate not only their job, but life itself. Also at fault is the ridiculously centralized system of drink ordering employed in most bars. Typically the server takes your order, trots up to the end of the bar and waits for the bartender, to whom they relay your order. Almost without question, the waitstaff is not allowed behind the bar. It's a Moronic, bureaucratic, and inefficient process. For example, even if you just order a couple of domestic bottles, the waitperson isn't allowed to reach in and grab them from the cooler. Everything has to go through the bartender. Meanwhile the thirsty and hungry patrons twiddle their thumbs.



At the fifteen minute mark of our seating, EmptyHead brings our beers. The Budweiser bottle she put in front of me was some snazzy aluminum promotional with "Red Sox" plastered upon it. I looked at the beer, my eyes widened, and I apologized to her,

CaptiousNut - Oh...I can't drink this...I am a Yankees fan.

EmptyHead mutated into Stone-FaceHead. She didn't laugh, smile, or even blink. I have seen this reaction a million times. The young lady couldn't tell whether or not I was serious - she was paralyzed by her own ignorant confusion. Now I am a profoundly sardonic person, after ten years even my wife can't always assess my sincerity, so this waitress' blank stare revealed her entire profile in a nanosecond.

Sarcasm was obviously her Kryptonite. Right away I dialed it back, let out a light laugh, and explained that I wasn't really a Yankees fan. There was still no flinch in her petrified stare. I dialed it back some more and took the conversation elsewhere. She told me she was a grad student. "NO SH*T!", I said to myself - I've only met a couple thousand facsimiles of her, starting with my time a UPenn.

Here's the key to understanding this species - these grad students are usually very dumb BUT think they are very smart. It's a disconnect that tortures every fiber of their being - not to mention the rest of the human race that interacts with them. When I proclaimed that I couldn't drink a beer because of the bottle it came in, she simply couldn't comprehend what I was saying. She went silent because she was afraid to respond incorrectly and make the cardinal sin of appearing foolish. They didn't teach us how to deal with a disgruntled Yankee's fan in the waitress training program! It should have been on the test!

If she couldn't even muster up the courage to ask me, "Are you serious?",then how smart could she really be?

This is why these people go to grad school. At root they possess a deep mental insecurity about how intelligent they are. They believe a specialized degree will somehow certify away their insecurity. Grad school isn't simply about avoiding the real world; I would argue that it's a veritable anti-depressant for these folk. Frankly this is why I have to mess with them. They need to be mocked and reminded of their papered over neuroses. This is also why they do their darnedest to self-segregate - a most illiberal strategy if you ask me.

A couple of examples. Greg Mankiw has made it abundantly clear that he only wants academics commenting on his blog. He's explicitly said as much and used the ruse of "promoting civility" to censor Captious comments.

Also, I have a good friend who spent a total of fourteen years at Harvard: undergrad, grad, and teaching. I once asked him to count up how many "Republicans" or "conservatives" he knew out of all his friends, family, and acquaintances. The number he tallied was five!!! And he was counting me as one of them. Now this is what I call self-segregation. Behold the "diversity"! (I am sure I mentioned him before.)

I had a golf buddy in South Philly who, let's just say that when I call him a toothless Neanderthal miscreant, I am indulging in high euphemism. One day at his place I witnessed him take his shirt off, blow a prodigious snart into it, and toss the shirt in the direction of the hamper. "WHAT?", he screamed at my incredulous StoneFace, "It will get washed!". Of course I have plenty more stories on this guy but you get the point. Anyway, he had a great expression for these young ladies who struggled with basic human interaction - he called them "Hillary"'s. Now he started using this term probably in 1994 or 1995, i.e. back when Bill Clinton's nominal wife might still be confused with a harmless political enthusiast. How's that for some caveman perspicacity!

Usually some goofy, if not ugly, young woman would come into the clubhouse donning a Wharton or Penn Law sweatshirt and my buddy would rib me, "How you like that Hillary, cuz ?!?!?!...I bet you got a lot them Hillary's there at that school of yours...HaHaHa"

And that we did, but not as bad as the bevy of Boston-area Hillary's.

Now I am digressing way too much. So we had a dimwitted, punctually challenged Hillary wait on us at our first stop.

We paid the tab, jumped into my most fuel efficient car (Ford Explorer) and drove into downtown Boston.



The next stop was Rattlesnake. We get there, sit at the bar, and order a beer from a complete dweeb of a bartender. Think Arvid from Head of the Class - but then subtract about 40 pounds. This guy would NEVER get a bartending job in all of Manhattan; they would profile him out in a heartbeat. I am not even sure the better places would dare even let him bus tables. I thought every bar owner in America understood that rule number one is to put, if not a Hollywood-looking person behind the bar, at least to avoid hiring people who look like they belong at a Star Trek convention. On a side note, the bartender did get all giddy upon hearing me talk about Man Versus Wild.

After a few minutes sitting there, we realized that the air conditioning was not on. They had the windows open up front and the cheap owner obviously didn't want to blow cold cash out into the street. But it was ridiculous - and it was Boston. We were sitting there sweating and it was hotter inside the bar than outside it. So we couldn't stay there too long - two beers and hit the road. (No old coots there this time.)



Now here's where Boston reveals itself as a joke of a city. We went back down Boylston Street towards Cactus Club. The walk is .7 miles. WE ONLY PASSED ONE OTHER BAR ON THE WAY THERE. I could not imagine walking in a real city anywhere in the world and having only one bar in a stretch this long, no less in such a central part of town. The walk is actually a nice one; architectural wonders blanket the area and many people could easily confuse the area with a desirable place to frequent. That is...unless you need a beer to slake your thirst.

AND, the lone bar, Solas, that we did walk by looked horrible. They had bright lights on inside and an octogenarian female bartender (I kid you not).

Cactus club was empty. We file back to Lir Irish Pub which in its better days was known as McCarthy's - a place that was actually a ton of fun. The theme there used to be movie songs. They would play the video versions of classics like from Grease or whatever on tv's plastered throughout. The place would get raucous since everyone was singing along to the popular tunes. I had more than a couple jolly nights there.

But now it's Lir. A few months ago I popped in there with this same friend of mine. We sat at the bar for over 5 minutes without even a glance from the bartender. You know, if it's crowded 5 minutes is nothing BUT the bar had maybe 10 people at it in total. So we walked out that time - as we should have this time as well.

I won't bore my millions of blog readers with the details. Though the air conditioning was on and the service prompt, the people in there were bizarre (there was a loud coed gay softball team in there or something) and the bartender was a contemptible young lady - some ugly, rude, arrogant illegal immigrant from Ireland. I just don't see how one can be a bartender and be supremely arrogant. These types always remind me of the loser at Bloomingdales in Manhattan that sold my wife and I a $1,200 couch five years ago. We bought the cheapest sofa they had in the store for our 519 square foot apartment, and while we were paying, the patronizing, middle-aged sales guy quipped, "...I guess it's a good couch for when you are young and struggling."

Yeah, I am sure a retail sales guy, who likely still lived with his mother in Queens, has so much more money than us who both worked in the Wall Street area. In hindsight, I really should have laughed in his face and un-holstered my own condescension.

Back to the Lir bartender - she is also just flat out stupid. She works for tips for crying out loud yet acted like we were bothering her just by sitting at the bar. There was a little more to what happened here but I have to move on. Writing this post is just getting me riled up again.

We walk out and go into the Pour House next door. It was a lot more lively and looked to easily clear the low hurdles set by the preceding bars.

But yet again, we stand there waiting over five minutes for a drink while the bartender completely ignores us - though at least this one had qualities important to the superficial male. Others come up to the bar long after we got there and she serves them first. Now at this point in the night (1:00AM) I am benumbed by the entire night of horrible service. As she is serving the latecomers next to me, I said to my buddy, "How can I possibly give her a tip?".

So I didn't - an extremely rare action by me. In fact, I can't remember any other time that I have had to make such a statement. A couple of minutes later the bar-chick looked at me a little cross-eyed; I was tempted to do something: either count out the $600 I had in my wallet right in front of her or lecture her about basic bartending etiquette but really, what would be the point? One drink and we bolted.

I have declared it before but it needs repeating, WOMEN CAN'T BARTEND.

Oh yeah, and "Boston Sucks".