#11

THE FA CUP FINAL - WEMBLEY STADIUM SATURDAY 30TH MAY 2009

As you may already know, I got to work at Wembley Stadium for the FA Cup Final yesterday. I've worked at Wembley a few times previous to this, but as you'd imagine - this event is a tad more special.

Upon arrival, I was allocated the area known as The Great Hall. It should be noted that the various rooms and restaurants at Wembley morph and merge into a number of different manifestations. This week, The Great Hall was 'The FA Club' - the hangout for all of the major sponsors of the FA and their guests, as well as some British celebrities. Some sponsors include: Carlsberg, McDonalds and National Express. All booze was on the enormous tab of the FA. ALL BOOZE.

I snagged the bar as my place of work - pretty easy, handing out free bottles of Carlsberg to all these folks, topping up the Carlsberg urns - basically a table with a tub in it - filled with ice and hooch. This urn was to be constantly full with no less than 12 brews at all times, there were 5 of these urns - all of them close to the bar, which basically had an unlimited amount of booze. No doubt that the patrons were grateful of the FA's generosity.

SO - the day's events...

Near one of the two giant TV screens where they were showing how the two teams got in the Final (Chelsea and Everton you troglodyte - get with it), Everton supporters cheered as the ever-important goal was replayed in front of them. I was walking past with another waiter, who must have been in his 40s, and had a chalk stain of a hand print on his back and his shoulder. Someone got him good. I think he found the cheer to be a little bit too loud as he says to me,
"Bloody hell, life eh?"
I raised my head in half-hearted acknowledgement. What the hell does that mean? 'Life eh?'. You poor thing, you're waiting in the most prestigious room on arguably the biggest day on the British football calendar. Yeah life really sucks. From then on, I decided not to tell him that he had white hand print on his shirt. I was going to, honest.

As the day wound up later, tiredness set in amongst everyone - staff and managers alike. See the way it works, you have a general restaurant manager and then people below him such as bar manager, back-of-house managers and managers designated to areas of the room. I have deduced though, that technically these people are all on the same level on the hierarchy ladder - as many managers swap around rolls. Anywho, they started biting off each others' heads quite blatantly. Concurrently, the people back-of-house whose job it was to put away dirty and clean glasses into their designated areas, decided that life was all too hard.

'Where are you getting those glasses from?' I was asked.
'The bar'
'Can you stop bringing them please?
'Why?'
'Don't you want to go home today? This is taking ages...'
'I'm just doing what I'm told' which is all one can really do when getting paid minimum wage. And who cares, you clown - you get paid for the hours extra you work. Go ahead, I dare you to approach a disgruntled manager and demand that you go home. Good luck, you pillock.

Later on, as I was signing out I overheard (eavesdropped, sure) a conversation explaining that a worker leaned over a bar, took an ice cube out of a bucket and put it in his mouth - all in front of a customer waiting for service. He got kicked out. Nice one!

Yep.

Oh yeah, the actual FA Cup was in the room for a while, the percussionist from the band kept nodding and smiling at me as if to say 'You know what's goin' on mun' (he was Jamaican) and I served a dude from Eastenders tea. I found out that last one much later as I'm not familiar with British soap operas as much these days.

Pip, pip.