Plenty of characters have wished for time traveling abilities. Real or fictional, every character follows an individual narrative, but the tapestry of life itself ensures that certain events in every story are shared with others in some way. That is to say: shit happens to all of us, and sometimes others get to stand around and bear witness to your misfortune. Resultant dreams of time travel reflect an innately human desire to revise ‘bad’ history in a misguided effort to somehow make the present feel better.

What I can say for sure is, plenty of shit certainly happened to me during my extended tour of duty in hospitality. By its very nature, the hospitality industry combines all denominations of human in a carefully concocted recipe of compulsion, designed to quickly relieve you of your hard earned dollars. It’s a fleecing that I willingly participated in and derived income from for a not-insignificant number of years. Your wish was my command, and as such I met and dealt with a whole slew of degenerate gamblers, illicit drug dealers and users, dropkicks, and otherwise garbage humans with an overinflated sense of entitlement.

The following is probably my most arduous tale of woe to date, and a true story detailing one of the many misappropriated weekends of my twenties spent working the devil’s trifecta of hospitality: Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. If time travel was as tangible as the jerks I dealt with, there is one Friday in October 2012 that might actually be worth paying a visit.

2022 comment: The definitive version of this three-part story is available on a defunct Wix website I created during university. Enjoy.

Read on.