It’s match day: Wales verses South Africa. Since it’s one of the Six Nations rugby match-ups, it’s cause for one of the busier days of the year at the pub. We’re just across the river from the 75,000-seat, retractable roof arena, and guests have poured in from across Britain, Ireland and South Africa. The day seems as much devoted to drinking as it is to watching the match, so by the time I arrive to start my shift at 9pm, most people have either gone home or are beyond inebriated. It makes for an easier job for me, since all I have to do is clean instead of dealing with the drunk patrons.

As my co-workers end their shift at 2 and 4 in the morning, they decide to stick around for a few drinks. I serve them and we alternate answering the door as the hostel guests return from their wild nights out. All in all, it’s a pretty relaxed night, until about five in the morning, when my coworker runs back from answering the front door.

“Shit,” he mutters as he grabs the phone. “I need an ambulance right away,” he says into the receiver.

I run to the door and look outside to find a man slouched over on the ground outside our hostel, unconscious. He’s surrounded by three drunk Samaritans who rang our doorbell to alert us of the man. He’s lying on his side, face toward the ground. Not wanting to move him, I feel his back to check for breathing. I’m relieved to feel it rise and fall, but the relief is only temporary as I notice a pool of blood on the pavement beneath his head.

“Uh, guys,” I yell back to my coworkers, who are inside because the phone’s reception doesn’t reach to the spot where the man is laying. What follows is a game of telephone where my coworker relays what the person on the line is telling him to do.
“Turn him on his back!”
“But what if he vomits? I don’t want him to asphyxiate.”
“The woman on the phone said you need to make sure his airway is open. Turn him on his back, push back on his forehead and pull up on his chin.”

He’s a heavy bloke, but I manage to turn him around to find the side of his face covered in superficial but bloody wounds. His eyelids start to flutter as he regains consciousness. By this point my coworker has gotten off the phone and comes over wearing sanitary gloves. The ambulance is on its way, he says. We try to get some information from the guy, but his slurring is so bad he can’t convey anything. I notice his fly is down and surmise that he fell while attempting to relieve himself on the sidewalk.

We sit with him for 45 minutes waiting for the ambulance to arrive. Finally, it gets there and two guys in their fifties emerge and traipse over to us. They wear the expressions of men who have seen this many times before, men who know there’s nothing urgent about this situation, just a guy who drank too much and will have a nasty headache in the morning. No hospital bill though, thanks to Britain’s national health care. They put him on a gurney and wheel him into the ambulance. The guy wasn’t staying at our hostel and he wasn’t drinking in our bar, so I haven’t heard anything about it since.

The experience served as a good reminder – working in a bar can be a lot of fun, but it requires dealing with some serious situations too. I’m just glad I had my coworkers there to help me out.

At my last job in Galway we would call them zombies — the customers you always seem to get stuck behind, shuffling aimlessly through the main aisle, while you were struggling to carry the heaviest box of your life to the other end of the shop.

I had no idea the zombies would follow me to Cardiff.

After I finish cleaning up the bar at night, the main task my job requires is answering the door. We don’t have a curfew for our hostel guests, so they’re free to return at any hour of the night. They take advantage of that right and return all the way through breakfast time. In the early twilight hours, when the sky is just hinting at a lighter shade of blue, I’ll often answer the doorbell, check the guest’s room key to make sure they’re staying here, then peer down the long road to see a staggering figure heading my way.

Sometimes he’s alone, sometimes he has a lady in tow, staggering in discord from one another from one end of the sidewalk to the other. Sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, I swear I hear a faint moan, “Braaaaaaiiiiins.”

When they reach the door, they’ll spend a good few minutes fumbling through their pockets for their room key as they slur the requisite “Is the bar open?” Once they get inside the zombies will often approach the bar in a vain attempt to bribe me into serving them, so I craft a zombie defense:

The sun rises and I survey the damage done at the hand of the zombies. Rubbish strewn about, fences torn apart and bile throughout the streets. It’s not hard to see why we keep a club behind the bar.

I call it The Enforcer.