At the weekend job, it would appear that we’ve long been making a crucial error. We’ve been actually doing our jobs, not documenting them. Which means that, when some fuckwit decides to save a few quid, he looks at us and says: they’re not doing anything, lets cut down on them.

A lot of this isn’t our fault, of course: Microsoft Excel (the decision making software of choice in such fuckwits) is not yet able to calculate the value of violence deterred, or of defacements not carried out because someone was kicked out early on. But a little might be our fault: when we kick someone out, or sort out someone passing out in the toilets, or knock back a load of wingnuts, we’ve not written it down, in triplicate, for the fuckwits to read.

Then someone decides to cut numbers, and all hell breaks loose.

Firstly, they do it on what could well be our busiest night of the year, so the under-age drinkers were plentiful, as were the very very drunk folk. Door were left unattended for a while while things were sorted out; jobs were left undone because there was nobody to do them. All of which was documented, and emailed to a long list of people.

Tonight, there was no concert. There was, however, a rather large drunken person that was required to leave, and his slightly drunken mates who were, we were assured, very well connected¹, and would be waiting outside with a veritable army, just for us. Which was nice, since we didn’t have the numbers we like to have. But they were gotten outside and the buck was passed to the lucky folk who have to care about the outside. And we went back in, time passed, we closed up, kicked out, locked up, and then found out that our large drunken friend had, instead of carrying out his threats on people (nearly) his own size, knocked the tooth out of a girl outside. And was awaiting the tender ministrations of the PSNI.

And that was most definitely documented. With a ‘cc’ list longer than my arm.

I don’t like having to justify my existence at any job, and I don’t like writing memos at all. But when needs must, and shit like this happens, it does make the writing and justifying that little bit easier…

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¹ – One of the lesser realised side effects of the ongoing peace process is the way that more and more HMOTP style threats can be dismissed instantly. ‘ere Mister, don’t you fucking touch me, my da’s head of the [acronym] can be easily met with And he’s going to break ceasefire because his dozy son can’t handle his drink, is he?, and so on. The threats have always been meaningless, but making the threat-maker realise that they’re meaningless is a very satisfying thing to do. Yes, I’m petty. What’s your point?