St. Patrick's Tiki Bar

For reasons I cannot explain because they just do not make sense, I am always surprised to find out that my work friends actually have lives outside of work. The other day I spent one of my rare breaks with someone whom I “work with” in the sense that we both work for the same company, but in different departments that have little, if any, interaction. As she told me about her weekend, I realized that I spend a lot of time at work and a lot of time thinking about work on my down time. As an IT professional, I can be called in to work at moments notice. Likewise, my schedule is not set in stone: late nights and early mornings are not uncommon for people in my field. I do not spend nearly as much time in the office as my network administrator and engineer; those guys come in early and stay late in the same day at least 4 days out of the week. I consider myself to be very fortunate because even though I am paid less, I am compensated for my time with overtime pay; those on salary can kiss the extra hours they spend at work goodbye.

On top of putting in overtime on a regular basis, I wind up doing work related activities during “my time” usually on a daily basis. There is no shortage of certifications to prove your worth as a professional in the IT industry, and unfortunately, one must have as many as possible to get an interview these days, even if they are “paper certs” that were only passed, barely, due to a two week cram session before the exam. IT certifications have lost their credibility over the years because they are cheap and easy to get; the difficulty only comes from the test taker’s ability to memorize questions taken from the test verbatim. As much as I like to keep my brain stimulated, reading technical manuals in my spare time is not the way I like to relax. I cannot tell you how many times I have fallen asleep on the couch with a 5-inch thick book opened across my face. My point is that reading press books is a lot like work for me: I spend all day working on computers only to come home to have to read about fixing computers. I know it is for the best, though, so I try to make the best of it.

Fortunately, I did not think about work much this weekend. Saturday was St. Patrick’s day, a holiday that is sacred to me not because it is an excuse to drink heavily, but because it is about the fellowship of man, people coming together for a common cause: umm… drinking. Nevertheless, every post-21 birthday I have had has been spent with my friends and this year was no exception.

Saturday started out as any Saturday should: a brief 2.5 mile jog through the neighborhood, followed by a couple of hours of kickball practice. Even though our “practices” have mostly been scrimmaging against the Pregnant Cheerleaders because only 5-7 people on the team bother to show up, it is still one of my favorite days of the week. After a fun-filled hour-long scrimmage, we came back to the apartment to clean up before going out for the night.

The night, while not the same level of awesomeness that O’Connell’s is, was still a good time. We hit up Numero Uno, a pizza joint famed for it’s incredibly cheesy pizza goodness. I thought the pizza was good, not as good as Guido’s, but still damn good. Our plans deviated from normal March 17th festivities when we drove to a Tiki bar rather than an Irish pub. If you did not already know, Los Angeles is a ginormous city, full of lots of people that like to drink. Rumor has it that if we had gone to an Irish pub, we would have waited in line for 2 hours just to get in to the establishment before we spent another 2 hours waiting in line to get drinks from the bar (I later found out that O’Connell’s was just as bad this year). Waiting in line is never fun, so we decided to hit a smaller bar that had nothing to do with Ireland.

The bar was pretty much your “average” Tiki bar: they served tropical drinks in Tiki head mugs and there were Tiki head statues all over the place. The DJ was probably the raddest dude ever; his music selection was practically the top 100 greatest songs of the 80s. As cool as the bar was, though, the experience went down the crapper as the night wore on. The building was very tiny and many people had the same idea we did about avoiding the Irish hotspots in LA, so the place filled up quickly. Not only that, but it turned in to more of a disco as more Hispanic folks started showing up. I have no problem with Hispanics, but very loud “Oompah” music is not what I want to listen to when I am drinking. Megan and I left after midnight, leaving the rest of the gang to party in the dark. Overall, going out to a Tiki bar was fun, but nothing can ever beat hanging out at O’Connell’s for 6 hours with your best buds.