Here’s the point when it comes to bartenders: Think of the most optimistic you can be about humanity. I mean those moments, maybe right after sex, or just after you got married, or just after you got hired to your dream job. I’m talking, the best you can possibly imagine humanity can be. And in that moment of pure bliss and utter optimism about your fellow man, assign a percentage of people who are just complete assholes.
When I say assholes, I mean, genuinely and without any doubt, the type of person that is nothing but pure, unadulterated incivility. In that moment, when we are at our most optimistic about humanity, the type of person who would make our bottom, say, five percent of humanity. The people who are just awful human beings at every moment, or worse the people who are generally good but just lose their mind for a moment because, well, life is hard and sometimes we do that.
In a given night, a bartender interacts with at least one hundred people. On most normal nights the number is higher than that, and on busy nights the number is several hundred. That means that, statistically speaking, a bartender has to deal with the bottom five percent of humanity at least a half dozen to several dozen times, every time they go to work.
Most people deal with the same one or two dozen people when they go to work every day. Granted, some of those two dozen people can have bad days or generally be bad people. While the statistical probability that one of those two dozen people will rank amongst the bottom five percent of humanity is relatively high (a one in twenty chance that someone within a group of twenty four will rank in the bottom five percent means a virtual inevitability that at least one person within the group will be terrible), it is generally the same person that achieves this rank every day. As such we learn to avoid that particular person, or forgive the people that are clearly just having a bad day. The bartender has no such luxury, and even if he did has to deal with at least five times as many terrible people every day.
Given this statistical inevitability, it should come as no surprise that bartenders become jaded and hateful towards their fellow human. After all, by our math, bartenders have to deal with five times as many terrible people each day as the normal person. What should be the greater surprise is that they are capable of remaining civil at all.
This bartender is one of those rare breeds that has, from the beginning, rejected the bitter bartender approach. It certainly helps that he is surrounded by alcohol at all times, both during and after his shift. Ultimately, however, it comes down to a choice that he makes. There are bartenders around him that have access to all the same alcohol to which he can drink, but choose to remain bitter about the assholes with which they deal on a daily basis. In the end, choice is a freedom we all enjoy, regardless of our influences. Choice is our most individual freedom, and we all exercise it on a constant basis. The question is not how often we make choices, but how wisely we make them.