The Worst Beginning

There’s a story behind the name of this blog, like with most things, and like most of my stories it start with drinking. Then continues with drinking. And then some (because no good story ever started with“So I was eating a salad...”).

It was Pablo’s birthday on a sunny March day, so many of us that had worked at the bar and a few of Pablo’s other friends had decided to gather with him in his back yard and have a few drinks to celebrate. In true style for this group we started at 10am by tapping a keg of Cooper’s Sparkling that someone had appropriated from a bar.

There’s something special about tapping a keg at 10am on a Sunday, it’s like Monday morning knows it’s about to be desecrated and you can almost feel the universe holding its breath, as if to say “oh God, what are they doing?!”. This was the equivalent of revving the engine of your brand new Ferrari, turning to the crowd of onlookers and saying “watch this!”. This was always going to end badly.

By midday we’d already had a few impromptu wresting contests, one of which I won against my supervisor because I held her in the air upside down until she admitted defeat, and i had cheerfully polished off several pints of beer and quite a few Uncle Charlies*.

*An Uncle Charlie is a mix of half vodka & Red Bull, and half champagne, served in a champagne flute (I was drinking them in pints).

We had fired up a BBQ in an attempt to slow the avalanche of the dozen or so hospitality staff sitting around putting some hard yards into getting written off, but it was really a token effort at best (isn’t it always?). This did serve as a great interruption during which we could make a few little speeches about Pablo and remind everyone of the occasion of his birthday. It was during this time and some of the stories that were told that I managed to be more offensive and insensitive than usual.

 

To be fair, I had developed a habit of pointing out that things "weren’t so bad" by responding to a tale of hardship with what was almost a catch phrase; whenever someone went on about how hard their life was, or complained about being overworked, or any of the hundreds of whinges we all put up with on a regular basis (you know the type; “I didn’t get enough sleep and I’m broke and my job is hard and wah wah wah” etc) I would respond with something along the lines of “It could be worse, you could have cancer”.

 

Mostly I would say this because I was sick of teenagers whinging about crap that really wasn’t that much of a problem. The world was going to keep turning, the sun will rise in the morning, your life isn’t over just because you have to work this weekend and can’t go party with your friends. In this case however, it probably could have gone unsaid.

Back at the BBQ someone was telling a story about a friend of theirs who caught his missus cheating on him with his best friend, after getting fired earlier that day and reversing over his dog (or something, I was getting pretty smashed by this point). So I’ve responded with“well, at least he didn’t have cancer” and basked in the immediate drop in temperature around me. If we had been indoors I could have sworn we aircon just kicked in full blast. Unfortunately, we were outside and the frost forming on my beer was a result of the cold glares of quite a few people around me.

Pablo suddenly remembered he’d been meaning to show me something inside the house, away from everyone. Right. Now.

As it turns out, one of the people I didn’t know, who had been sitting right next to me, was his ex girlfriend from a fair while back, and had been battling cancer for a number of years.

Oh.

The immediate feeling of guilt and shame sets in. Unfortunately I barely notice it thanks to most of my day having thus far consisted of drinking so hard that sobriety had long ago disappeared into the rear vision mirror of the shitshow express that the party was rapidly turning into.

Pablo assured me it was fine, and I had no way of knowing, but I should probably not mention cancer again today. That was the plan at least.

So we ventured out back to the party and continued drinking until it was time to head to the pub to see what revelry we could drum up. The bar we were heading for was renowned for its Sunday Session and was a favourite amongst the neck-tatt, single mum, white gansta, generally retarded crowd. If you had a dead end job, a kid to a partner you’re no longer with, or considered a Bali Ed Hardy t-shirt to be your best “going out” shirt, then this was the place for you.

We liked it because the jugs were cheap, the women dressed like they were cheap and it enabled out favourite pastime of sitting around and judging people. We weren’t really judging anyone that day though, we rolled up like a tornado of drunk, horny bar staff and the beer garden became ground zero. There’s really not much more to tell about the day except that it was widely considered to be the inspiration for the movie “The Hangover”.

We drank as a group, we blacked out as a group.

Somewhere around sunset we all started to black out, apparently we kept on partying though because during the following week the entire staff of the bar we worked in played a communal game of “What The Fuck Did I Do Last Night?”, we managed to piece together a few parts of that nights Deleted Scenes eventually, but it was not pretty.

We went to a park and climbed on a children’s playground. I travelled to and from this location in the boot of a car, apparently.

Someone was the Paper Bag Penis Ninja. (google it)

Someone climbed a tree. Briefly.

Someone fell out of a tree. Hilariously.

I got so wasted I was convinced I could see the future. I told one of the other bartenders that he would die in 18 months in a house fire and would be survived by his girlfriend (who he hadn’t met yet) and their newborn son. I managed to tell him this completely straight-faced. What makes this so much worse is that usually when someone who is so drunk they can’t lie on the ground without holding on tells you something like this, you dismiss it as someone being blackout-drunk. He believed me and immediately started arguing that it couldn’t happen to him, and that he was always careful. I apologised and told him there was nothing I could do, I couldn’t change the future.

Holy shit I was wasted.

I finally blacked back in on a couch at a friend’s place with the core group sitting around outside drinking still. The sun was starting to come up. I was duly informed by one of my managers that I was in fact a pussy because I wasn’t drinking, so breakfast came in the form of a vodka and whateverthehellwaslyingaround. I joined the remaining battlers as we shared the sight of the sun rising over the neighbourhood and all cringed in pain as we scrambled for sunglasses. Sunlight was not our friend at this time of morning.

It turns out that during the course of the previous afternoon at the pub I had been quite a busy character. At one point I’d kept falling over to my left, and one of the barmaids had kept falling to her right, so someone had been kind enough to prop us up against each other. That’s teamwork!

Oh, and the girl with cancer? Apparently I only stopped making cancer jokes briefly...

Once I blacked out it seems I insisted on telling her a long stream of cancer jokes, not matter how much people asked me to stop. or tried to strangle me.Then I may have possibly abused the girl for having cancer.

What kind of a horrible bastard abuses someone for having cancer? Could I have done anything worse?

Apparently yes, because not long after that I ended up making out with this girl. For several hours...

What.

The.

Fuck.

Upon hearing this story, my fellow bar workers conveyed upon me a title that seems to have stuck with me in the years to come. A title that truly conveys a special level of depravity and moral decay i have displayed in the past and continue to display. What was that title?

-Worst Guy Ever

Mortal Responsibilty

People need to take mortal responsibility for their actions, and the actions of those under them. Not moral responsibility, MORTAL responsibility. Moral responsibility would mean that you accept the consequences of the decisions you make being right or wrong (in a very “good and evil” kind of way). Mortal responsibility is just what it suggests; life and death business.

There are a number of jobs in this world of ours that require people of outstanding care, dedication and courage. These everyday hero’s are trusted with our care and safety for a period of time, be it long or short. Speaking of shorts, sometimes these hero’s wear outfits that would seem strange anywhere else, for example the knee-high-socks-and-shorts combination worn by an overweight, 50 year old bus driver. Yeah, that mental image is going to haunt you.

We put our trust in others, it’s part of our interaction with other people that forms the basis for our society. I trust a pilot that he’s not going to suddenly try and find out if his plane can swim. I trust my bank manager that he’s not going to invest my savings in booze and strippers (that’s what I need it for). I trust a tattooist that he’s not going to make the coy fish on my arm look a lot like a cock (happened to a mate of mine).

The point is that these people are given a great deal of trust and when that trust is broken, the consequences are severe. It used to be the captain of a ship was responsible for the safety of his crew and passengers, he safeguarded their lives with his own. The captain was expected to go down with his ship, should the worst happen. This really gave captains an incentive to make sure their ship was going to make it to port. When your options are “everyone arrives safely” or “death” you really get some motivation happening there. Apparently that doesn’t happen quite as often these days, as we’ve recently realised with the Costa Concordia’s Captain doing a runner like a pissed teenager legging it from the scene of an intimate couple between mum’s Hyundai and a tree that “wasn’t there a moment ago”.

Later on in history, aircraft pilots found themselves in much the same situation, mostly because your odds of surviving a plane crash aren’t brilliant if you’re sitting right at the point end when it hits the mountain (not that anywhere else on the plane is a whole lot better, or so I’m lead to believe). That and it was often considered “bad for business” if a pilot was seen to board a passenger jet wearing a parachute.

Other examples include Generals standing their ground at the end of a battle that didn’t quite go their way, or quietly going out into the garden with their service revolver after learning about a particularly embarrassing oversight (like losing their boss’s country to an invading army). Even Hitler did it, he saw the end coming, realised he had failed completely and punched his own ticket.

Recently in history, we’ve experienced a shipwreck of another kind, the financial cruise liners of several economies have run aground on the rocky shores of Ohfuckwe’vebeenspendingimaginarymoney-land. Someone else we trusted has gone and made a mess of things. Our bankers.

Traditionally at this point we would usually see bankers and stock brokers climbing out on the window ledges of their offices and performing a very well-dressed impersonation of a particularly chunky rain storm. But that’s the problem, they didn’t.

Instead they all looked a little bit ashamed, shuffled their feet, delivered a half-hearted we’re sorry” and fired a bunch of people that worked for them, some of them lost their banks and had to shack up with friends in other banks for a while. It was like the scenes after a massive natural disaster when people end up sharing tiny houses with strangers because they have nowhere else to turn. Except the houses are multi-billion dollar banks.

All of this was a few years back, and now we’re feeling the damage that that has caused. If these philandering phuckwits had done the right and proper thing by taking a running leap out of their 35^th floor office window we wouldn’t be hearing worrying stories about a second recession. They’d be dead, which usually prevents people from rooting the economy the second time round.

It also serves as a very poignant reminder of the kind of consequences catastrophic failure end in. The next round of bankers looking to sell a bunch of useless assets might stop and think about what they were planning on doing next year, because if everything went tits-up again their plans might be reduced to “testing theory of afterlife”.

So there you go; how suicide prevention hotlines have ruined the economy.

It’s up to you to stop this from happening again. If you get the chance to meet the senior executives of a large bank, do me a favour and point out how refreshing the air is outside the 35^th floor window. Maybe they should check it out.

-Worst Guy Ever