Slow nights suck. Time goes really slow, you know you aren't gonna make any money and anything you have to deal with that normally only happens on a busy night just seems doubly aggravating.
This was my night tonight. I had barely punched in when I had to deal with a customer that refused to pay a dancer the full amount of money he owed her. I told him as he made a spirited attempt to flee the club that he was short a few bucks and would he mind paying the girl what he owed her.
He revealed to me a couple of interesting yet irrelevant facets of his belief system, they went something like this:
A) He believed that dances were only X amount of dollars when they are in fact Y amount of money.
B) He also believed that Missy's Mump House was a better strip club and that "everything is better there".
I told him I it didn't matter to me what he 'believed' our dances cost, it's posted on the walls of the dance room for all to behold. They're called signs and they often convey valuable information, such as how much dances cost.
I also asked him why, if Missy's is so much better, was he here trying to cheat my dancers? which he didn't like very much. For some reason a lot of people don't like it when I infer that they may be a broke piece of fecal cheese. So he again refused to pay a measly $20 and I let him walk out the door and told him don't come back.
Fast forward 10 minutes and there he is again, holding out $20 to me. We conversed a bit further but I'm not going to bother you with the details. Suffice to say he used the phrase "don't try to play me" and other things I don't really understand because I'm about as ghetto as a Scandinavian mountain range.
I'd like to think that when all was said and done, that he left the club slightly more educated about out price scales and that I walked away still mystified about certain urban expressions. Therefore I call it a win for both of us.
Why some people think I will care about how much dances cost at other clubs is beyond me. If you were at that club then it would be relevant, but you're not, you're in this club and dances cost more here. It's like going into a shoe store and complaining that a certain pair of shoes cost more there than at another shoe store on the other side of town.
Guess what? No one gives a fuck but they aren't allowed to say it. If you want the cheaper priced shoes, go to where they sell them, you broke, soulless genital cyst.
But that's not all that was annoying about tonight. I had another "A" team/"B" team moment this evening. It went something like this:
I was, as usual, driving the shuttle around, desperately seeking customers for our starving strippers to feed on, but had to make a pit stop back at the club to take a leak.
I had just opened the door to the place when this little drunk guy who was trying to leave the club ran into my chest. He looked up at me and I looked down at him and then the bartender came around the corner and said that he was trying to leave the club without paying his tab and held up his driver's license.
I smiled my most disarming smile and said "well you need your license back, right? Let's go take care of that tab and we'll get you all squared away, OK?" I was patronizing the living quim out of this dude, but he didn't notice, so wasted was he.
The little imp merely nodded and headed off uncertainly toward the bar. "That's right, you're doing great" I encouraged him, grinning at the Door Girl.
He refused again at the bar, not seeming to comprehend the whole 'money for booze' concept and I gently loomed over him, being all kinds of helpful. It was only $30 for chrissakes.
He got all ballsy again and said "I'm not gonna tip her" to which I replied, "that's up to you sir, but the $30 is your bar tab and that's all we need." He would end up paying and leaving quietly and I was just going to walk to lizard when I noticed my fellow B teamer, Joker, waving frantically at me from the Counter station.*1
So I wander over and he asks me if I could watch the Counter while he took care of something, no more than 5 minutes. I said sure because I like Joker and us B teamers have to stick together. But as I did so, I suddenly thought to myself, "hey self, aren't there two other Floor Sloths working tonight? "Yes self" I thought back to myself, "I wonder what they're doing since they are clearly too busy to walk forty feet and help a fellow Floor Stiff out."
So I glance over to where the A teamers hang out when they're doing nothing, which is 90% of the time, and there they were, Seamus and Lo-Jaq, faces buried in their phones, doing fuck all.
It was at this point when I realized how wide the whole "A team/B team" schism is here. The other B team Floor Guy was more comfortable asking me, who was actually doing something for the club and had to piss so bad my belt was getting tight, than the A teamers who were both doing absolutely nothing, forty feet away.
Nice, eh?
In a related side note, when I called off recently due to a bad case of I Don't Wanna Work, I texted the M.O.D. and told him I couldn't make it in and that I had already tried all the B-teamers, two of which were already scheduled and the third I hadn't heard back from and that I wasn't going to waste my time asking A-teamers to cover my shift because we all knew how that was going to work out for me.
Since they haven't managed it in almost five years, I feel like they certainly aren't going to start now.
And you might be thinking at this point, well crap, that's gotta be it, right? What else could've possibly happened on such a miserably slow Thursday?
Well there's one more shit-cherry on the cupcake, dear reader and it's something that normally only happens on a busy night.
SO we have this one dancer, I'll call her Saber since she's named herself after a weapon of all things. Saber is what I refer to as a World Class Stripper, i.e. she could walk into any strip club on the face of the planet and instantly be hired. She's insanely good at her job and I'll admit she's one of the most trouble free dancers I've ever worked with. She doesn't get hammered every night and on the rare occasions she does, the girl can handle herself. She also doesn't dabble in the sordid world of intra-club politics/bullshit and thusly I've never had to pry her apart from whatever other entertainer she's currently trying to maim.
She appears Asian, but is actually Merznakistanian if I remember correctly. She speaks with a heavy Russian accent, like a Bond Villain, and has all the naughty bits you can handle, muchacho.
If this chick makes less than $150K a year, I'll eat a small child of the readers' choice while riding a a polar bear down Wall Street wearing only clownface and a chainlink jockstrap.
But I won't have to do that no matter how much I want to because Saber hauls in money like sardines in a net. Men fall all over themselves to give her money.
The reason I bring her up is because tonight, like many nights, she's lingering around after hours because some dumb prick with more money that sense is doing a seemingly endless chain of dances with her after we've closed. At $25 a pop.
On a busy night I don't begrudge her this because we're going to be there longer anyway, cleaning up the destruction drunks leave in their wake and waiting for the manager to do all the esoteric money stuff that always takes him forever. Plus she can be a generous tipper from time to time, recognizing that every now and then she can be a lovable pain in the ass.
But on a night where we could've been home very soon after club close, it sucked. And then she added a couple more coats of suck-gloss to the finished product, namely:
Just sitting down right in front of us with this apathetic cumbubble, chatting gaily about stuff that doesn't mean anything, while the entire staff of the club sat abjectly fifteen feet away from them, clearly wishing they could go home after a disastrous shift, yet trapped until this fucking customer was out of the building and this fucking dancer was in her goddamn street clothes and also ready to GO HOME.
Next part of the saga is that the customer had to pay with a credit card, which makes it so easy to tip someone, such as someone you've kept from their bed for an extra hour or more for example. Yeah, that kind of person.
But Mr. Bubble wasn't that kind of guy. Zero fucking situational awareness in this one. He gladly signed a receipt for over $700 and didn't tip a miserly dime.
What a cunt.
Then Saber broke the tension with this question, "Does one of you (referring to us Floor Guys) want to run him to his hotel in the shuttle?"
Insert chirping cricket sound effect...here.
Did she seriously just ask that? Best call him a ride and leave it at that. So she did.
Finally the panty-whiffer's uber arrived and he left the club. That's when Saber unleashed her final suck-salvo. She sat down at the bar in her thong and bra and proceeded to light up a smoke and start talking about more inane crap with the bartenders, instead of, and I stress this, going to the fucking dressing room and fucking getting ready to fucking go the fuck home, where we'd all like to have been an hour ago.
I don't care if she tipped a hundred, which I seriously doubt and am checking up on right now.*2 After the split it would've only been $25 each and I would've gladly paid $25 to just to go home at that point.
Another $25 wouldn't have even put us over $100 tonight, it was like January bad. Utterly bereft of hope.
It galled me. Both Saber's and Ass-Tonguer's total obliviousness to their inconveniencing of a bunch of already exasperated service industry folk, pre-beaten by a slow, unrewarding grind of a night and now forced to wait until she felt she had squeezed the last cent from him and he felt all avenues to Coitusville had been explored and found to be dead ends.
Had it been me who was loitering in a business that had closed an hour ago*3, I would've acknowledged the unhappiness of the employees whether they had made it obvious or not, and let me be clear about this: I would've tipped them generously.
Because I hate working for free and I'd expect every other human does as well and am sympathetic enough to understand this.
In closing I'd like to say that if I'm ever put in charge of stuff, then by law, everyone would have to work a minimum of six months in the service industry. It would make the world (or at least 'Murrika) a better place to live in and if it didn't I'd execute a few more people, just for the hell of it.
Meh. I'm done. I'm gonna go back through and reread this post for a final edit sorta thing, so if I feel like doing pictures, you'll know because you'll have already seen them by this point. If there are no pictures, it means that after rereading the post, I decided not to do any.
Just wanted to give you a head's up about it because time travel can be very confusing.
Asmodeus is the wings benath my wind,
-The StripperHerder
*1 The Counter Station is the most static position in the club. Whatever poor, misbegotten wretch is saddled with this job has to mark the sheet for each song any given dancer does so that the club can take a goodly portion of the money from those dances. He can't leave his post unattended without risking a serious word-fucking by our manager, Sir Ominous Thunderblam VII.
Experiments in trusting dancers to be honest about how many dances they performed have proven to be wildly unsuccessful. One might even use the term 'catastrophic failure'.
*2 Hey, this is Future StripperHerder coming to from Sunday morning. I DID check up on what Saber tipped that night and it turns out it was $25. So considering there were 4 of us Floor Grunts working, the extra money for over an hour of bullshit was $6.25.
Spectacular.
*3 This is complete hypothesis because I would never do this unless I was friends with the owner and had been specifically invited to stay.**
**I won't even go to a restaurant within a half hour of closing because I've worked in enough kitchens to know that it's a dick move and you'll be lucky if your food doesn't have some 'special ingredients' added.
