This is a series! You can read all the other tips here: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5. Or you can read about this incredibly awkward sort of love triangle-esque (only so much worse!) situation that happened this one night. Or you can read none of those and just read this one. Here at FranklyRebekah we like to give you all the choice.
Don’t be a dick about sports. I don’t mean like, voicing your opinion about your favorite team, although really I could give a shit. I mean don’t be a dick about getting your specific game on the TV, especially when the bar you are walking into is a bar that sometimes plays sports and not a sports bar. I have examples!
About 3 weeks ago I was at work, having a relatively run-of-the-mill day when in walks this dude. He marches into the bar, looks around at the 4 televisions and exclaims, loudly and rudely,
“What? No Nets?! We are in Brooklyn, right?”
People do this literally all the time. “What? No Yankees?!” “What? No Giants?!” “What? No Rangers?!” What if I walked into a bar and was all, “What?! No women’s gymnastics championships?!”*
Anyway, all the time. All the fucking time. It’s like, do you see a Nets game? No? Well, then, clearly the Nets are not currently being played in this bar. I didn’t say that, though. Nope, I was nice. But see, here’s the thing about being nice to people who ask to see games in that manner: they are almost always assholes of the “give them an inch they’ll take a mile” variety. Whatever. I walked over to him and this happened:
Me: “Can I help you?”
Dude: “Yea, you don’t have the Nets on.”
Me: “That’s true. Is that you telling me that you would like to watch the Nets?”
Dude: “Yes. I mean, we are in Brooklyn. I mean, how could you not have the Nets on?”
Me: “Well, I mean, the Nets were a New Jersey team that everyone ignored until Jay-Z got on board but whatever. What channel?”
Dude: “I don’t know.”
HUGE Nets fan right there. Really needed to watch the Nets game and had absolutely zero idea as to what channel they were playing on. In my experience people who are adamant about specific games have at least some semblance of an idea as to the channel. But not this guy. He starts throwing out random channels. And there I am, like an idiot, pointing the stupid remote control at the cable box, scrolling up and down as this dude is like
“TNT! MSG! ABC! ESPN!”
Up and down and up and down and up and down. In the midst of the scrolling, as I am getting extremely irritated, I scrolled over a hockey game to which another customer, sitting right next to the first customer, exclaims,
“The Rangers! I want to watch that!”
At which point I got extremely frustrated, slammed the remote control down on the bar and said,
“You know what? Why don’t you guys figure it out yourselves. I want nothing to do with this television.”
And then do you know what happened? The HUUUUUUGE Nets fan could not figure out how to work the remote control. He was standing there, staring at it, pointing it up at the television, staring at it again. It was almost as if he thought by the pure power of his mind he would be able to make the channel change. He then got frustrated and said, exasperatedly,
“How do you work this damn thing?”
To which I replied,
“You have to actually press a button. Just point it at the television and hit ‘guide.'”
The hockey fan then took the remote control out of the Nets “fan’s” hands and, quickly, got the game on. The Nets fan then ordered a drink. He then sat there, staring blankly at the television as if he had never actually watched a basketball game ever in his entire annoying life, and then he took out a book. He started reading a book. And then he left. Before the game was over. I bet he just moved to Brooklyn like, yesterday. Asshole.
So just as an FYI, my bar has exactly 4 flat screen televisions. One of those televisions is like 10 years old and is hued kind of greenish. I have to climb up on the back bar to turn it on because the remote is so old that it no longer works. For those 4 televisions, we have 2 cable boxes. That means we can have a total of 2 channels on 4 televisions. I tell people this all the time and they don’t seem to compute (again, a bar that sometimes plays sports, not actually a sports bar).
Like the other day when this guy really wanted to watch the incredibly important Rangers game which was so important that he was the only person at the bar who wanted to watch it but all the TVs had the Knicks game on which didn’t matter at all because he doesn’t care about basketball. I wanted to be like, dude, move to Canada.** Anyway, he got all irate that we didn’t have the Rangers game on. My boss even went so far as to take a poll down the bar to see if there was another soul in the bar who was interested in watching hockey, there wasn’t.*** So I, again, stupidly, trying to be nice, told him we only had two boxes so we could only have two channels on. He responded by telling me to put it on one television. I’m like, dude! What part of I cannot put it on one television do you not understand? You have been hit by one too many hockey pucks. I tried to send him to a nearby bar with all the TVs in the world (some call them sports bars), but he wouldn’t have any of it. So I ignored him. And he left.
Anyway, if you want to watch something, all you have to do is say “Excuse me? Would you mind putting on the Strong Man contest? I like to watch dudes lift things that are so heavy that their noses bleed.” And I would say, okay, but I would be sure to put it one of the TVs that I can’t see because Strong Man contests make me want to vomit.
*I would never do this for three reasons. One, people would probably laugh me out of the place. Two, I doubt the sound would be turned on and you simply cannot watch floor without the music. And three, I think there are some pervy dudes who like to watch 14-year-old girls tumble around in leotards and that makes me feel icky.
**Actually, don’t. I have some friends from Canada and I really like them and I think probably I would like lots of other people from there too and I would not like to punish them with your presence. I will research islands with no inhabitants. You can move to one of those. With a TV. To watch hockey. There are flaws here…
***I told my boss my theory about the “give an inch take a mile” variety of assholes, of which this dude definitely was an example, so he left well enough alone.
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