Bill's Bulletin Board
By Bill Rea

It was hard to argue with the points Councillor Bill Cober was trying to make last week, as council debated what should go into the policy about serving alcohol at Township facilities.

But at the risk of alienating people who volunteer their time to run some of these facilities, and who already have enough hoops to jump through to keep these places financially viable, I have to argue that it's better for some volunteers to be put to inconvenience enforcing a policy, than to have to answer a lawsuit stemming from someone being killed as a result of over consumption of booze.

And the fact is that despite the inconvenience, there are a number of mechanisms to help make things a bit easier to live with.

One of them is the Server Intervention Program (SIP) of the Addiction Research Foundation, and people who prepare alcoholic drinks for a large crowd should undergo this training. I guess it wouldn't be such a bad thing for anyone serving drinks, be it at a banquet or for neighbours at a home barbecue, to take it too.

My family held a party a couple of years ago for my brother's 50th birthday, and the three people brought in to handle the serving all had the appropriate training.

There was a time when people wouldn't have thought of such things, but of course there was a time when our society wasn't as litigious as it is now.

I personally go along with the notion that the individual is the best person to regulate how much he or she should have to drink. That's what I always do when I'm out. I keep very careful track of how much I consume, partly because I don't want to make a fool of myself by getting drunk, and partly because I usually am the one who's driving. With both those considerations in mind, I find it pretty easy to be responsible in such situations. The problem with that, of course, is I'm not everyone else, and there are some pretty irresponsible people out there.

That reality means that others are obliged to intervene sometimes.

One of the first company parties I ever attended as a member of the working world was held at a private home. The hostess (one of my colleagues) met me at the door with appropriate greetings, then demanded that I hand over my car key. I later learned that she had been keeping very close count on what everyone was drinking, so when it was time to leave, I had no trouble getting my key returned. One of the fellows in the office, I found out a couple of days later, had to sit chatting with her until the small hours of the morning before she was satisfied he was fit to drive.

No wonder I was sad to see her leave the company.

This was in the days before anyone had every heard of the concept of designated drivers.

No matter what kind of inconvenient rules people have to go through now when they serve booze, things are a lot better when there were hardly any rules.

I used to tend bar for banquets and the like at the hotel where I worked before I got into this business (almost a quarter century ago), and I didn't receive any training, once I convinced my boss I knew which bottle contained the scotch and which had the rye. He did verify that I knew how to operate a bottle opener, a skill my father had taught me some years before, and I really made an impression when I announced that I knew how to mix a martini (again, courtesy of my dad).

The only other instruction I received was to have a eye for under-age drinkers, and not be afraid to ask for ID, which I never was.

When it came to refusing to serve a person who had had too much, it did happen occasionally. But that person had to be really wasted.

Such situations wouldn't happen in today's entertainment scene, at least not at a reputable outlet.

I confess that I'm really not that up on what goes on in drinking establishments these days, simply because I don't frequent them nearly as much as I used to. I don't have to. As a man reaches a certain age, he comes to have more confidence and appreciate that he can stand up for himself. He doesn't have to go out drinking to satisfy his social needs, but knows he can face the world as a true man and undisputed master of his own fate. Besides, my wife would never let me go bar hopping.

There was one summer when I was a kid (still in school) that I spent working at one of the pubs at Ontario Place.

That whole experience was an education in just how irresponsible people can get, especially when it comes to how much they drink. It's memories of that summer that keep me abreast of the fact that just because I can keep track of how much I consume when I'm out doesn't mean the rest of the world can.

Controls on drinking amounted to just about nothing in those days, compared with what we have today.

There was one night when the whole park was

just one big drunken zoo. There was a major concert, and I suspect more than a few bottles were being surreptitiously consumed in the audience. But the show ended and the really serious drinking began. It was a night of rowdiness, ignorance, boorishness, shouting, screaming, obscene language, helping get people who had passed out back into chairs (not really caring what happened to them after that), and cleaning stuff up off the floor, be it paper, cigarette butts, broken glass or vomit. There were male louts making comments to females that would probably land me in a politically correct mess if I repeated them here.

The highlight was the fight that broke out 20 feet from me as I was taking down the outside posters at the end of the evening. It started when one guy sucker punched another with one of the finest right leads it's ever been my pleasure to observe. Batman and Robin couldn't have topped it on the best day they ever had.

Things didn't develop much from that point, since the police showed up and started trying to restore order. And that took a while because there was so much booze mixed up in the equation.

I think back to that experience now and then, and come to realize why we need policies and rules to keep irresponsible people out of trouble.

Even if they're sometimes inconvenient, I think they beat the alternatives.