Conflict Resolution

When you work at a bar, conflict can come from many different sources. While most of these are alcohol and patron related, some conflicts can arise from the way the bar is run in the first place. Last year the bar was treated to a surprise health inspection and if you have ever stepped foot inside of KAMS you would know that we did not do that well. KAMS prides itself as being the oldest bar on campus and often gives alumni that wave of nostalgia when they walk in due to the lack of major renovations made over the years. Unfortunately, nostalgia isn’t the only thing that hits them when they walk in; they’re also greeted by the classic KAMS smell of molded alcohol. Needless to say, the lack of renovations and the lackadaisical way that cleans were held before the health inspection caused us to fail horribly. This put us on thin ice with the health inspector, which prompted our owner to hold a two-hour meeting with completely new cleaning guidelines and a new checklist for managers to live by when opening and closing the bar. This type of meticulous process of running the bar was shellshock for the staff because of the way it had been run previously. Our owner was notorious for cutting corners when it came to renovating and fixing the bar, so for us it was very strange when he played it by the book.

The doormen spent a whole shift deep cleaning behind the bar with bleach and bartenders were required to use three different cleaning products to clean down all the counter tops and the silver behind the bar. There was about a two-week gap between our first and second inspection and if the problems were not resolved, the bar would be closed for a week. While KAMS was not the only bar owned by our owner, it was the highest profiting of the three, which meant he was really our case when it came to cleans. The staff was very skeptical about the whole process because the whole thing could have been easily prevented had he just taken the time to regularly deep clean the bar. For us there was less serious implications, at the end of the day we could all find other jobs on campus fairly easily, however we all did our part and kept to the strict regiment. The one big issue we had that caused a lot of friction between our owner and the staff was the cleaning of our boiler room.

The boiler room of the bar also doubles as the file room for the timesheets and other accounting files that were needed for the bar. From the boiler room there was a vent that led outside to a grate that needed to be cleaned out due to the mass amount of gunk and old alcohol that was caked in there along with mud. Our managers originally suggested to our owner that we hire a professional service to fully clean the grate out and sanitize to ensure it was done well and quicker than putting two or three college kids with no real contracting or cleaning experience. Rest assure our owner decided that a professional service wasn’t necessary and as a result two doormen were stuck cleaning the grate for around 4 hours. As a result of their inexperience, they hastily started unclogging mud, which caused some of the liquid at the bottom of the grate to seep into the boiler room, which completely ruined a couple months worth of time sheets. Our owner was initially very mad, but quickly realized he was reaping what he had sowed by leaving this in inexperienced hands.

All in all, the health code scare helped KAMS get the deep clean it definitely needed, but the situation could have been very easily avoided by routine checks of problem areas. I would like to think that our owner learned his lesson from this random check, but I really have not seen a change in the way he handles the bar. Fortunately by the time of the next check I will not be employed at the bar anymore and will not have to deal with the last minute scramble like I did last year.