Bar one was run by the guy who used to produce Manfred Mann, it was OK, there was a periodic influx of famous names from the charts of the late 60’s and 70’s, I drank there maybe three times, maybe five, saw and heard everything anyone had to say.
Bar two was run by a guy who’d got out of Argentina during one of the purges.
Intermission.
Familiarity breeds contempt. For a wimminz, the difference between the so called alpha bad boy that makes her cunt drip and the beta loser who annoys her but can open his wallet and pay for her is just that, one is or has become familiar. Once you learn this, you learn there is no such thing per se as alpha and beta, just those that hand a wimminz all the keys to their soul, and those who stay as autonomous independent nation states…
Intermission.
The music guy talked about all the great things he had done to party, the argy guy talked about all the crap things he had done to survive.
Guess which bar I spent most time in.
Sadly, the bars of my youth are as gone as the speakeasy’s in the states, and they have gone because the people running them have gone.
I discovered long ago in life that there were “crews” of guys, recovery guys who worked motorway vehicle recovery, carnie guys who worked fairs and circuses, road guys who worked the blacktop, you get the picture, and each one was a certain breed, and when you did those jobs you either fitted in or got the fuck out, and fitting in was becoming one of them, it’s lifestyle.
The bars of my youth were still largely run by lifestyle guys, and it was at their feet that I learned that trade, to such an extent that many years later when an Egyptian running a 6th fleet bar decided that his face wouldn’t fit, him being an a-rab and all, and gulf war 1 having just kicked off and all, he asked me if I would run the place during opening hours, which were 10 am to 2 am.
Guy told me after he had never been so busy or taken so much money, all I did was what I had learned at the feet of bar guys, 4 guys walk in, four buds please, my response, WHY? yeah dudes, there is a bottle of bud, it is 225 pesetas, there is a bottle of San Miguel, it is 125 pesetas, both are free, enjoy and take your pick, the next ones you pay for.
The bud was yank bud, not the authentic stuff, the bar made 50 pesetas a bottle, the San Miguel was Filipino beer under licence, the bar made 75 pesetas a bottle, within 3 hours the word had spread and the place was rammed 18 hours a day for the next week, all drinking San Miguel at 50% greater profit per bottle, all because I gave away 4 x two beers at 10:05 on day one and told the customers the truth, this is better beer, cheaper for you, and more profit for me, you choose.
That and three other “tricks” was all it took, that and being able to emulate that old barman personality, if you think the barman has the coolest and smoothest personality you ever met, there will be no trouble of any kind in the bar, no matter how much booze is drunk…. the XO’s just started ignoring the place, there was never any trouble there, either inside or out.
Who is going to cause trouble? The beer is half the price of bud, which is all the other fleet bars stock, the burgers are OK, there is at&t phone home for dear john phone calls, a couple of kick ass ink guys, some hot young whores, great sounds, and the place is run by the coolest barman you ever met, who is apparently fucking all three chicks behind the bar simultaneously (the chicks agree that this is so) so they are off limits too… Not only that, they won’t rip you off, when you get drunk and declare your love of the place and try to drop the last 100 bucks of your liberty money as a tip, the barman gives it to one of your more sober friends, with witnesses, and tell them to give it to you back on board, so the second day after this happens the place is totally fucking rammed…. sardines clamouring to buy beer… This is too good a deal to screw up, or to allow anyone else to screw up.
To me, none of this shit was amazing, this is just what you do when you run a bar, guests under your roof.
I got totally fucked because most of my early life I grew up around competent guys, Jock L who was an alcoholic who had to literally drink an entire bottle of red label so he could steady enough to work, and work was splicing a 75 mile long cablecar system where each car carried 40 tons of coal, splicing the cunt UNDER TENSION, long splices, so the diameter of the cable didn’t alter…
Watching Hollywood and MSM portrayals of these sorts of guys, “mavericks”, is like asking a bunch of west coast 1% patch bikers to sit down and watch Sons of Anarchy, and expecting the TV to be intact 90 seconds after it starts.
Only way fuckers could portray these things so badly is they have never actually seen and experienced them in real life.
Mavericks weren’t assholes because they were so good at what they did they could get away with it, mavericks were so good at what they did because the only other alternative was to stop being an asshole the rest of the time… fuck that shit… may as well wear a tie to work and shave every fucking day… (hey, guess what I do now…lol)
My gig now, I’m one of the very very very few who does wear a shirt and tie and shave every day, ain’t that rich irony for ya, but, I’m the point man, the *only* one seen in the flesh, so shirt and tie and sleeves rolled up, do they see the cable guy or the cisco kid, no, they see the fucking consultant specialist, they are on board and on my side before they know it.
You gotta dress the same, but different, back in the engineering days everyone else would wear one piece overalls, white or tan or brown, I’d wear two piece green, bright green… I used to tell people, I can be invisible in any country in the world, within the limits of skin colour, just put on a pair of slightly dirty overalls, dirt on your hands, oily rag hanging out of your pocket, nobody would even see you, much less make you out as a foreigner, walk into any bar with other guys dressed the same and point at the beer and put the money on the table, you don’t even need to speak, better if you don’t.
So now it is non descript black denim pants and decent quality black shirt rolled at the sleeves, and always always always a quality tie.
Ask people 48 hours later who was there and the only thing they will remember is the tie, pass them in the street 7 days later and they don’t recognise me, turn up the next day in my tie and bingo, hello mate, how are you…
—————————————
In my *night* job, now that the IT doldrums of January have passed, 2014 is shaping to be the year people buy laptops, hate windows 8, and ask me to put windows 7 on them.
The difficulties are two fold, number one nobody supplies physical install / restore media any more, so #1 task has always got to be make sure you can rewind, that means pulling the hard disk and taking an image of it.
Personally if you are running windows I recommend Macrium Reflect for this.
Once you have done that, and verified the image, use Easus partition manager to wipe all the partitions on the disk.
Now your fun starts, back in the day, everything had a BIOS, now, not so much, hello UEFI, anything from a lowly cheap Tosh with celeron to a so called high end Acer with i7, and it is a pain in the fucking ass, because once you decide on install source, DVD or USB, you run into the problem that win7 was written before a lot of this hardware existed, so at the end of what looks like a working install you get a reboot and the install fails, no drivers…
If you gotta buy a laptop, Buy Lenovo / stinkpad, T series only, S series at a push, nothing else.
If you are a glutton for punishment you *could* go online and get the drivers for each individual machine you do and slipstream them into a custom win7 install image for each install, but life is too short.
- Disable boot security, if it is enabled the the UEFI / BIOS
- Set the UEFI / BIOS to compatibility mode, CLS or whatever they call it.
- Disable USB3 mode if possible, USB2 if only
- Set SATA to IDE, not AHCI
- Install win7 Pro 64, not any of the home versions.
At that point the install *should* work, should… no guarantees… some, like the Acer mentioned above, simply do not want to play, at all, for variations of at all that include life is too short.
Grab USB install stick (PowerISO will make a bootable USB stick, just point it at the iso image and the usb stick and sit back) for the latest distro of Suse, and sit back, cunt just fuckin’ works.
Course the punter now has a linux install, not the win7 one they wanted, some will be happy with this, some won’t, hence step one, way back up there where you took an image of the hard disk… sometimes you can do no more than hand that shit back in EXACTLY the state it was when it was given to you and make no charge…. hey, at least you haven’t fucked anything up.
Make no mistake, UEFI is all about saving money, it isn’t *better* than a traditional BIOS, Basic Input Output System, just enough to get the OS loaded and working, it is just cheaper.
Win7 was written before UEFI so it assumed the basic fresh install can rely on the BIOS to do really basic shit like interface to the IDE/SATA/USB interfaces without any drivers as such.
UEFI was written assuming everyone is going to install win8 which knows all about native USB3/AHCI interfaces etc.
Assumptions will fucking kill you, including the assumption you can roll back, if you do not have your own independent method of doing so, such as a whole disk image. I like Macrium, the physical disk was a 700 gig job, the macrium image which you can mount and read all 5 partitions on, is 20 gig… in a USB3 HD dock the whole job takes 8 or 9 minutes.
It’s the same in the day job with the cisco shit, #1 #show flash: so you know what is there, #2 #show run and pipe the lot to a log file so you can always no matter what get things back to the state they were in when you turned up.
Do these basic things and do them WELL 100% of the time, you can be the maverick and get away with the rest of your life and attitude.
Otherwise you better be prepared to change the rest of your life and attitude.
Or take a look at any wimminz or niggerz for what happens when you attempt to deny both options, which are strictly either / or options, baked in for life.
For Hans, and others.. >;*)
