This isn’t a specific story so much as a one of those weird “isms” that patrons seem to have. Although I worked in restaurants and bars for years, in the last few years most of my work has been in catering and in a private club in an arena. This is something I notice the most at the arena I work at and it will make sense in a minute, but I’ve had it happen at pretty much every place I’ve ever worked.

So in this club I work in, because it’s an arena, we have a very strict cut-off time for alcohol service which varies by event, but is the same for any vendor in the arena (i.e. the start of the 4th quarter for a basketball game or 30 minutes prior to the scheduled end time of a concert.) We’ll still be behind the bar cleaning and serving soft drinks, and we do try to give everyone plenty of notice of the cut-off, by invariably you get a person who misses the memo and tries to order a drink after last call. For whatever reason, almost without fail when I tell them we already did last call, the person will say “Even for beer??”

Like, maybe I’m naive, but doesn’t last call mean last call? Is this just desperation, or are there magical bars/event spaces/arenas out there somewhere that do last call but then continue to sell beer? I wouldn’t give this much thought except it happens so often that it’s a phenomenon to me.