Guest post: From Joe Sixtop

Joe sent me two short guest posts, so I've combined them into one. If you'd like to be added to the guest post queue, please send me an e-mail at slightlycranky at hotmail.com

 Several years ago I got a job at Friday's. It sucked and I hated it so after a couple of weeks I just stopped showing up. For several days afterward I'd get voicemails saying stuff like, "Joe? Are ya coming in today? You're scheduled!". The reasons it sucked are too many to mention here, but high on the list was that it was my first gig to require employees to refer to customers as guests. "Treat everyone like an honored guest in your home!", was the counsel of management. If you go to my shitty apartment you'll probably be offered some refreshments but they won't be Potstickers or Andre the Peachlifters and you're not going to be charged money! Longtime readers (both of them) of TAS probably think I like being pretentious and they're right. So since we're not supposed to call them customers and I think it's lame to call them guests, I call them clients.

If you work in the restaurant industry there's a real good chance that you're at least an occasional reefer consumer and an even better chance that you like to knock back adult beverages. You're probably unhappy with America's drug laws, especially how alcohol is pretty much legal and marijuana is not. You might have made the argument to someone about how much tax money could go into federal and state treasuries if the shit was roughly as legal as beer is, and you had a good point.
     Fuck that, though. Look how much money the alcohol industry spends buying politicians to cockblock any competing intoxicants. Look how much tax money comes from legal alcohol. Look how financially hurting America and its cities and states are. Think how fucked they'd be if every server that favored cannabis legalization quit buying alcohol. Ha Ha Ha! I think you see what I'm getting at.
     Please talk this idea over with your coworkers at the after-hours bar y'all go to for late nite happy hour after your shifts are over. Feel free to invite anyone who wants to participate, not just restaurant folks. If we get enough people and start by springtime, you and your friends will be purchasing Party Joint Menthol Light 100's by Philip Morris at Walgreens and woofing down hookahfuls of Humboldt Heaven along with your Miller Lites at the after-hours bar before Thanksgiving.
If this thing gets going there's a chance you'll make just a little less money for awhile, especially if you're a bartender, but if you're anything like me you'll more than make up for it in savings from all the alcohol you won't be buying, especially the way you drink; at bars, prodigiously, tipping 50%. Plus you'll get out of your rut and experience life sober and without hangovers for a change. Who knows? You might like it.