May Be Time For Some Changes

So we're back at our old watering hole to watch games.  Only four people show up, God bless them.  It was a fucking goddamn loss, too.

But that's not the matter, or at least not the most pressing thing.  I go in there this afternoon to make sure everything's hunky-dory.  Don't worry, the waitress said -- "We'll take care of you."  But when I come back in the evening and ask permission on where we are allowed to sit, the asshole bartender, the one who now seems to run the place in the evenings and who started minimizing our presence last year, coldly shunted us over to the side.  Another game is being shown on the big TVs.  And oh, no sound.

Well, if that isn't a sign.  Moving us around proves that he's is shoving us down our priority list, even though we've been watching games there for several years now.  Unfortunately, from a pure business standpoint I can see why he's doing that.  I think we would have more of a say on where we want to watch these games if there were more of us.  But there hasn't.

In what may have been a peace offering, this guy turned up the sound on the TV, so even though there are speakers piping in the audio of the game on the big TVs, we could hear our game.  But only for a little while.  I suspect that after we cheered a touchdown, the asshole bartender turned way up the sound on their game, thereby making it impossible to hear our game anymore.

At a couple points this evening I looked at the bar, where we usually sit/sat.  There may -- may -- have been people watching the game, although I didn't see any of them with the colors of the two teams the asshole bartender put on the big TVs.  You know, I can deal with a guy who's charisma-challenged and wants nothing to do with chit-chat; he's got a bar to run, and it really is easier to just say how things are going to be and be firm about it.  I understand that.  But I really do think he turned up the sound of "his" game to piss us off and make us feel unwelcome.  And that is the playground antics of a bullying, passive-aggressive dick.

So now I have to find an out, a new bar to which we can congregate.  There are other factors to leaving other than him.  For one thing, I got sticker shock when paying event parking prices for the first time in order to watch a game downtown.  And for another, I keep complaining about why so few people come to these.  Maybe it's the location?  I mean, downtown Minneapolis Saturday night hosted a Twins game (they got swept in a doubleheader -- thanks for playing, Twinks) and a pop-up street pub, so that could dissuade a lot of people from even bothering to take the drive.  Maybe we need to find a different area.  Of course, it might not matter where we watch our games if the team we're watching ain't worth shit.  And by the looks of them that game, they ain't.

Nevertheless, I have to start looking elsewhere.