Well, today is 1st January 2023 and I'm happy to say we have survived Christmas and New Year's (mostly) unscathed. Our Christmas Day was amazing in the pub, we were open for 4/5 hours and had an amazing group of locals and newbies in. New Year's Eve was also a good night. We were both apprehensive about the night but with a bit of door control and customer selection we got through it without trouble, fights and nearly no drama.
You wouldn't expect trouble in a sleepy little town like Wimborne. Sadly that isn't the case. Across the few pubs that we drink in there has been fights, punching and theft. You try to control it as much as you can but that isn't always possible and people seem to want to find or cause trouble wherever they are.
Trouble, AKA STOOLGATE.
Luckily all of these things happened outside of The Oddies, it was nice to not have to worry about that type of trouble as it broadly doesn't happen here. However, in the same way that there's trouble in a sleepy town in Wimborne there was "trouble" in a sleepy pub like The Oddies.
I've talked previously about change and how resistant people can be to it. Well, these past 10 days or so all I've heard is bloody moaning about the god damned bar stools. The locals like their seats, their positions along the bar and the routine that it gives them. However, when your bar is only 2/3 metres long and you have a wall of people sitting on bar stools it becomes quite difficult to serve big groups of people and sadly you stand behind the bar and watch people walk in, see no space, and leave again.
So we made an executive decision (based on the simple fact that the last time I checked it was my pub) to remove the bar stools when we were expecting a lot of people. It helps to increase footfall and get people in the door.
Well my god, you'd have thought that I'd asked all the locals to strip naked and chant to a voodoo god with all the moaning I got. It went on day after day from 23rd December to 31st December and it reached breaking point last night. A group were talking about "who got to sit on the only stool next" and my response was "if you keep this up there will be no stools to sit on ever again". Well that soon shut them up.
It shut them up until they realised that 1. I was only going to be open 12-6pm on Sunday and closed 2nd / 3rd January.
Heaven forbid should Lee and I have a couple of days off and to do that properly we actually need to close the pub and have no one in the building.
Well this has disrupted the mini quiz that the locals have every Monday and I had one local say to me "are you not going to work a full day on Sunday". Well he nearly wore his drink!!!!
All that being said, the grumblings are what they are. And once we've had two days off we'll be back to normal, the stools will be returned and peace will resume. Well at least until I find something else to change and cause disruption in "their pub"!!!!
Happy New Year's everyone, I hope this year brings love, peace and happiness and I hope everyone celebrated safely on NYE