RSA

Achtung!

So another week, another update from Oz. Ok so maybe it’s been a little over a week but I’m lazy and finding the time to write these is pretty hard sometimes. Still no kangaroos but this is probably due to the lack of housing and employment available to them in suburban Sydney. Incidentally the lack of employment available to me in Sydney is pretty annoying too, over the last week or so we have applied in every bar and pub we have come across in our walks around the town and various other shops and restaurants. We have only come up with one job so far at a small café in a nearby shopping centre, which is great for travel costs (there aren’t any) but the pay is bare minimum. $10.50 PH, where bar work is around $17.50 PH. Hopefully over the Christmas period we will get some calls back when all the staff start sodding off to the beach with their families.
We had to pay out $110 for 2 courses in order to legally do bar work, so we’d really like to make use of that. What were these courses? Well in Australia you can’t legally work in a bar unless you’ve done what’s called an RSA (responsible service of alcohol) course and gotten the certificate to prove it. This is a one-day course where they tell you all the ways to spot a drunken person and all the ways to avoid serving them. You see in Australia it’s illegal to serve drunken people. It’s the same in England but they don’t take much notice there, where as here they are really harsh on it, if you serve somebody who is drunk then you receive something in the region of a $500 fine and the establishment gets an investigation into it’s license. I mean what happened to the good old days of watching your mates getting completely trolleyed, throwing up on themselves and passers by and then seeing them get dragged off to some fat heffers bedroom? That’s a real night out.
So I had to sit through 6 hours of listening to a man who was clearly the Australian equivalent of Santa (Rotund man, Short sleeve white shirt, reddish face, glorious white beard and moustache, took offence when I sat on his knee), talking about all the laws of the land, and how 5 years ago nobody took any notice of them. Then recently, what with the rise in barbecue related violence and the drunken slaughter of 600 possums by angry cricket fans, the RSA laws in which drunk people are no longer allowed to have fun became compulsory.
So now the only defence we have against people wanting to buy alcohol in a bar are these extremely convincing lines they taught us:

Swaying customer: “Barkeep, A glass of your finest ale!”

Me: “I am sorry, I am unable to serve you any more alcohol at this time, it is against the law for me to serve intoxicated people. Therefore at this stage I can only offer you tea, coffee or a soft drink.”

Swaying Customer: (looks befuddled, then glasses me in face)

Me: “ARRRGFLARGLE, MY PRECIOUS EYES!”

Second swaying customer: “Good day! Rum and coke please.”

Me: (bleeds profusely from facial region) I….I am sorry…unable to serve alcohol at this time…. Tea…soft drink.”

Second Swaying customer: (Looks confused then stabs me in chest with switchblade)

Me: “Blurk…my soft, fragile lungs, how quickly they fill with my own fluids. Damn you RSA!”

So you can all clearly see from this highly accurate and true account of a typical days work in an Australian bar, that RSA is an occupational hazard to us all.
Moving on, I also learnt that coffee does not sober you up, it simply makes a “More alert drunk”. Now lets think for a second, doesn’t that terrify you? I mean think back. When we are drunk we are much more intelligent, we find we can suddenly speak much more of a foreign language than we thought we could, we understand complicated topics and situations enough to ramble on about them for hours, we realise that we can do kung fu and could easily take down that gang of bikers without breaking a sweat, need I go on? No I think you see where I’m going with this, we could make use of all these superpowers that alcohol grants us if only we didn’t have the negative effect of alcohol putting us to sleep. If coffee makes a more alert drunk, then think of all the things we could achieve! If you ask me it’s not the average Joe having a night out we should be worried about, it’s all those homeless people and alcoholics we see on the street, I mean my god if they find out that coffee will make them more alert then they could rise up and rule the world. So tomorrow my friends I shall go to parliament and propose this: The systematic rounding up and launching into space of all alcoholics and homeless people, away from our precious coffee forever. I only pray to the heavens that we aren’t already too late.

If this article in any way has offended you, then please feel free to throw yourself down a well.
- Walexei.