'Twas a dark and stormy night...

While I have no idea if, in other lines of work, one has nightmares in which exaggerated versions of the worst possible things that can go wrong all happen on the same day, I can definitely say that this is common in the restaurant industry. It has been my experience that these nightfrights most frequently haunt waiters, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the back-of-the-house is familiar with these terrifying and seemingly real occurrences - they're just too machismo to talk about them.

Interestingly, in all of my years in this business (21, on and off), I have only had "waiter nightmares" and never any of the other varieties corresponding to any of the other positions I've held (host, barback, bartender, oyster bar/appetizer "chef," supervisor, caterer, barista, etc.).

Last night, I had my first "bartender nightmare."

It went something like this: I arrived to work late (something I almost never do anymore) to find that everything in my bar had been rearranged and all of my glassware was mixed up, as opposed to being neatly arranged by type of glass. None of my liquor bottles were in the correct spot and my garnish trays looked forlorn and haphazard. My bar tools (muddler, bar spoon, Guinness spoon, shaker tins, strainer, zester/twist maker, salt/sugar tray for my rims, spindle, cutting board and knife, champagne stopper) were all gone...nowhere to be found.

My bar had filled with people prior to my arrival, but none of them had been helped yet and I had no idea how long they'd been sitting there waiting. The printer that spits out drink orders for the wait staff was loudly regurgitating tickets one after another with no pauses in between. Furthermore, the tickets all had drinks listed on them that I've never heard of. This I found odd because, as a veteran bartender, I know my drinks pretty well and I'm always getting on the case of our novice bartender, Evan, to stop relying on Mr. Boston to save his ass when someone orders a freakin' Rob Roy.

However, when I go to "cheat" and look up the unfamiliar drinks, I notice that our cocktail menu looks different. Initially I am thinking this is good, since I wrote our new cocktail menu about three weeks ago (honestly. regardless of the weather, it's embarrassing to have a hot buttered rum on the menu of specialty cocktails in late March). So I open up the "new menu" which, rather than being a one sheet, is a tri-fold or quad- or quint-fold (I didn't have time to count the panels) that opens into this epic list of made-up cocktails that came from I-don't-know-where and, while the cocktails I'd assembled were on the list recipe-wise, they'd all been given different names and I have no idea how or why this happened.

I'm trying to make the drinks for the waiters and for my customers and, natch, nobody is ordering a draft beer or wine by the glass (and, if they did, there is no doubt that my keg would blow or that I'd pour a fraction of a glass of wine only to discover that there is no more of that wine in the house), yet I'm unable to find the correct glass for the drink and I feel like I'm moving at the pace of, well, super slowly.

I card a customer in the bar and she gives me a driver's license from Illinois in which there is a small inset pic of her as a 7 year-old child and then a larger pic of her as an infant with her dad holding her on his lap. Damn driver's licenses keep changing and hell if I can keep up with the changes, but I've never seen anything quite like this before. Luckily, Sasha, who owns the bar next door had recently brought us an identification manual showing the 2006 versions of the driver's license for each state (this part is true), but of course I can't find the damn thing.

My customers are getting angry because they've waited so long for their drinks and I'm getting more and more frustrated at my own incompetence. As I'm wallowing in my misery and lamenting my sorry-ass lack of skillz, the power goes out - but only in the bar. This, actually, is not such an outlandish thing as, in real life, about once a month, our power goes out in the dishroom only (and always at the most inopportune moments). When this happens, the dishwashers go and get some candles off of vacant tables and continue to wash the dishes by hand, by candlelight. Anywhere else in the restaurant and power outage = freakout. The restaurant is still buzzing with lively activity and the waiters are cruising by my pass-bar looking for their drinks and telling me I need to do comps because the drinks are taking too long. I don't have time to investigate the power outage so I try to keep making the drinks in the dark.

Owner-man John comes in to the bar and I show him the Illinois driver's license and ask him if he thinks I should serve the girl. He pulls out the manual that Sasha gave us and, for him, it was in the spot where it was supposed to be.

People were ordering weird shit like champagne with a shot of whiskey in it and blended concoctions - but not the usual suspects.

I'm looking around my bar and I notice half-made cocktails in glasses full of ice. I don't know who half-made them or how they got there or what is in each. I start sniffing them and sticking a straw in, blocking the top end with my finger, so I can taste the contents and attempt to figure out what partial drink each might be.

I can't identify any of them.

I look over to my tables in the bar and notice that some of my customers have drinks before them, yet I didn't make them or serve them. Where did they come from? I have no idea. One couple who had waited patiently for their drinks, for what may have been an hour or longer, finally gets up to leave. I beg them not to and promise that their drinks will arrive shortly.

I then notice that all of the customers from the restaurant have left and the lights have been dimmed. My customers in the bar are still waiting for their drinks. They're all pissed and I know that none of them will leave me a tip and all will complain to owner-man John about what a shitty bartender I am.

I wake up in a cold sweat with the certain feeling that it was all very real. I suddenly feel very blue. I reach over to my nightstand and put on my glasses; then I open up the book I'm presently reading (Anthony Bourdain's The Nasty Bits) and dive in. J comes upstairs and asks if I'm alright. She brings me coffee and I relive the nightmare aloud. She's laughing hysterically and I join in. Although, somehow, there is a part of this terrifying dream that still haunts me and I fear my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

J knows this, too, but neither of us mention it.