ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
Dale Peckham often laughs when people say they’ve really had to work for their money.
Because only a select few have ever worked a double shift on ANZAC Day and lived to talk about it.
The 29-year-old former bartender spoke to The Advocate about his days working behind a bar and while he’ll never go back.
“It was fucked. There were literally people everywhere and they were all pissed,” he said.
“We were getting smashed like ten deep at the bar all day, it just never ended. Plus, I had to work a double that day and it was pretty much like spending 16-hours standing up making drinks,”
“I mean, that’s actually working. Fuck it was gross. I’m so glad I don’t have to do that shit anymore, that I’ve finished uni now and I’ve got a shitty job in a cubical in the bowels of some hideous mid-80s office block on the edge of town. Just how I like it.”
The weak-minded, typical Libra is now an auditor at a Betoota Ponds boutique accountancy firm, where he rarely has to do anything remotely physical or remotely taxing.
However, still to this day, he recalls those days he spent behind a bar with contempt, much the same as his paternal grandfather had contempt for the Thai-Burma railway and the Japanese men who kept him hard at work.
“I literally had no other job options,” he said.
“I had to be a bartender because that’s all I knew. It was the toughest thing I’ve ever done. I think Grandpa would be proud of me.”
More to come.
