Post 31 – Liquid Lunch

We’ve got a sweet little number going on in Switzerland. There’s this little hotel bar round the corner from our flats that is always empty. I mean literally empty. This place has Italian Sky, which shows all of Serie A, all the Sky Sports live Premiership matches, all the Prem Plus matches, the live SPL matches, all the La Liga matches, most of the Bundislega and most of the French First Division, plus all the Champions League and the UEFA Cup. Basically if there’s a live match on anywhere in the world it’s on Italian Sky. If there’s not a live match on, all 30 of their sports channels are showing re-runs of matches from the weekend. As soon as we walk in, the barman who we have befriended pours us two pints, fills a dish with peanuts and hands us the Sky remotes. When our glasses are empty he brings us fresh pints to our table. We get drunk. When we leave and go to pay out bill (you generally work on tabs in Switzerland), he charges us for 50% of the beer we drank (the other day we had 7 pints and got charged for 3), then he prints us a receipt for food or dry cleaning so we can claim it back on expenses. And what does he ask in return? Well so far, nothing. We throw him a few tips and offer him a couple of pints but he always refuses. This kind of flagrant fiddling of expenses can, and probably eventually will, lead to me being fired, but fuck it, you don’t turn down a free lunch. Or 20 free pints of Swiss beer in our case.

Somehow in spite of this arrangement we’ve managed to avoid going in to work in a state like we did on our first day. The extreme displeasure that came our way that day was enough to put me off drinking on a school night for the rest of time. It seems that in Swiss culture it is not acceptable to turn up for your first day of work reeking of beer, unable to keep your eyes open and disappearing for a half hour to have a snooze in the shitter with your head resting on the toilet roll, every part of your wretched body sweating alcohol, your stomach churning with knots which almost cause you to double over in pain. It’s taken a lot of hard work to win back some of the brownie points we lost that day, and I doubt we ever will fully gain the respect of our colleagues and superiors after that ill-fated day. One thing is for sure, there will certainly be no repeat performance. Or at least until next week when we go down to our new local to watch the Champion’s League.

Song currently stuck in my head – “Nineteen” by Paul Hardcastle.
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