Deja-vu.
Tuesday 19 June 2007
Bit of an odd night. I spent most of it (5+ hours) chatting to the latest member of the DS team at the main gates and even though he's quite a few years my junior, we had a lot in common.
The evening was quite peaceful until about 2am when, naturally, a few pissed-up staff members starting having words with each other, and before you knew what was going on one of them - a senior bar staffer - had only gone and tripped over a kerb and smashed his face in. He lost a tooth, may have disclocated his jaw (it was clicking constantly when he spoke) and there was blood and fat lips everywhere. A right mess. Naturally, he refused to believe he'd tripped over and instead decided to take it out on his three 'best mates', also staff, even going as far to ask them how much money they'd be willing to take to fuck off out of his life forever. He's a thoroughly decent and amiable guy when sober but this has unfortunately been coming for a while. They're really going to have to crack down on this after-hours staff drinking, as we're getting a fairly major incident every other week. The best option, rather than banning it entirely and punishing most of the innocents, is to just lay down a law that they have to all leave at midnight. End of problem.
Besides that, one other item of note was another young staff member bolting out of the complex about 1.30am, pissed-up, with a baby in a pram. It didn't take me long to realise that he hadn't actually come into the complex with the infant, and naturally I called it over the radios and for a little while started to fear the absolute worst. Especially when he came back into the complex ten minutes later by himself.
What happened, it turned out, was that he was so angry at a young female parent in the bars who was out of her skull despite having her 7-week old daughter in a pram next to her, that he'd found out where she was staying and taken the baby back to her chalet, where her mother was waiting. It was actually a pretty good deed, but it kicked off a right panic and for a period we assumed it was a bout of baby-snatching. The mother was so drunk that she literally had to be carried back to where she was staying by another punter. Quite shocking really. At least, it would be if this kind of thing wasn't becoming entirely too familiar.
posted by Sheamus @ 3:00 am
