Golden Generation

I was scrolling through Tik Tok the other day and came across a post by a random guy that said about a golden generation of co workers that were the reason to go to work, that they were once in a lifetime group, that you'll never be able to replicate that group and when that group broke up it was  sad, sad day.

I'm not saying that I don't enjoy working with the people I do now or have since but the Liquid posse from 2002- 2004 was the best group of cohorts in mischief that anyone could have. I'm still surprised that we manged to get any work done at all, not only that but we were one of the most profitable nightclubs in the company for those couple of years. I look back on those days and wonder how the boss Zane, manged to keep us all in check and actually make the place thrive. He took a liking to me straight away after Jon, one of his assistants poached me from another club simply due to the fact I was from Lincolnshire and a proud Boston fan, something he as a Grimsby Town fan found oh so amusing, especially when they beat us 6-0 at home. He left us to our thing most of the time, leaving his long suffering assistant Claire to do most of the dirty work and although she did have a temper on her and wasn't afraid to show it, to staff and customers alike. I managed to mostly keep on her good side, although there was one or two occasions she pulled me up when I got a little too rowdy for her liking.

You had Mai, the queen of the entry till, who was one of the happiest people I've ever met, she never had a bad word to say about anyone and was often the one who defused situations when they got a little bit out of hand. Sam in the cloakroom was always the first one to suggest drinks on our nights out it also helped that her mum Janet was one of Zane's most trusted friends and helped us out on the busier nights in and around the entrance. She made a duo with Maria who we often dubbed the terrible twins, they could be a nightmare on the staff nights out, which were very much regular occasions. I remember on one such trip we went on the bus to a new club the company had set up and they both turned up with  a few two litre bottles of premade malibu and cokes that they passed around, and I blame for what happened later on that night, but I'll get in that later on. 

We had Sara and Donna the two main supervisors of the bars who had been there since the place had opened a couple of years before I started there. They lived together and often had to calm us down during our shifts, they each ran one of the bigger bars in the place (it had four) and on the busy nights I often found myself on bar 4 with Sara, which was the cheesey pop music room, and yes we sang badly and loudly, to this day everytime I hear Build me up buttercup, I think of her and those mad days in there. Greg followed me over from Space and was the bad boy of the group, he knew every dodgy person in the town and he almost had the shortest employment period of anyone I've ever met there. He used to partake in some slightly illegal substances and on his first night we had the drugs dog come into the place and immediately it went up to him and alerted, luckily he was also a very smooth talker and got himself out of bother. Lynne was his girlfriend and she had the most irregular fear of pigeons, she was convinced that one would fly into her and inpale itself in her chest. Wahleed was the first person who was employed at the place and was the quiet one of the group, he was also the first one of the main group of us to leave, his departure was the stuff of legend, we tied him to a chair and left him in the ice room and then shaved a strip into one of his eyebrows so he could live his dream of being a bad boy, well that's what we thought he wanted us to do anyway.

There was Peter Potenka, a Latvian who also used to work on a fruit and veg stall and used to bring carrier bags of fruit with him and eat it throughout the night, taking huge bites of pineapple between serving customers. You had the two Lionels, Gay Lionel and Quiet Lionel, the latter being the most fabulous person who ever lived and was always had sequins somewhere about his person and the latter barely saying a word but always smiling, even when you've asked him to help clear up the copious amounts of sick that we had to deal with on a frequent basis. There was Lucie, the hardnut of the group who I saw take on dodgy customers twice her size and leave them on the floor, she knew every camera blindspot in the place and often used that to her advantage. Alexi the Cypriot who would always disapear when it came to cleaning the aforementioned sick but used to constantly supply us with sweets which he had hidden around the place. Ian was the straight laced one who never did anything wrong and was always the first to volunteer to help anyone out. Amanda the girl who would randomly burst into fits of laughter at the drop of a hat and who ate a stupid amount of fried eggs on a daily basis. Dave Shailor who without a doubt had the driest sense of humour of anyone I've ever met and also provided the best putdowns known to man. Adam Bird who at the time was the worst driver I've ever met and ended up being a driving instructor years later.

We had a few other people who joined for short periods, like Ginger Steph, Atousa, Kevin, Matt, but the main core of people stayed there for the duration of my time there.

What made us such a tight group, who would walk about two miles out of our way to make sure that no one walked home alone and that the girls go thome safe. This was particularly bad for me as I had to do the last 500 metres or so on my own as I lived the furthest away from the club. We shared so many stupid experiences that I look back on, like the time Zane had the great idea of turning our dancefloor into a beach for a beach party theme, which meant using wheelbarrels to move four tonnes of sand up via a lift and then after the night having to sift it get rid of the all the crap because we'd only borrowed it from a local builders merchants. When we stayed overnight all bringing sleeping bags in so we could put the Christmas decorations up and having a pizza party at the same time. The way we would play around while on shift, shoving ice cubes down the back of each others trousers or using the soda gun to shoot sprays of soda water at each other. Covering for each other if we managed to get the attention of the crowd so we could have a little, shall we say adult based fun. The celebrities we had in, Keith Chegwin was a bloody laugh and a half, he stayed after the night and ended up getting drunk with the staff, Dot Cotton or to give her actual name June Brown, who drank two bottles of gin and spent the night signing autographs for everyone and then walked out appearing sober as a judge. We had a play hard and work hard philosophy and being at work was genuine fun. Yes we had arguments when you have the personalities like we all did there was bound to be some, I wasn't blameless here and there was a period of a couple of months where me and Donna didn't say a word to each other, but we eventually got over it and patched things up. 

The beginning of the end really happened in March 2004 we were on a trip to Wellingborough and a club called Life, it was another one of the Luminar owned brands and we all promised to be on our best behaviour, it did not exactly work out that way. I've already spoken about Maria and Sam bringing those bottles of Malibu and Coke so you can imagine the staff were already pretty well on the way to being a little tipsy before we even got to the place, a small pub crawl around the town before ending up in the club where for want of a better word we were a nightmare. This was a brand new club only it's third night open. Our recently appointed deputy assistant manager Matt (trust me it was a nightmare trying to work out the work order chart of the place) proceeded to try and get a promotion off the CEO of the company Stephen Thomas, who didn't take to kindly to his drunken ramblings and afterwards he wasn't with the company for much longer. One of us broke a toilet door off its hinges, no one ever admitted to this but the jury decided that it was Matt. Donna and Sara had a massive fight which resulted in Sara transferring to another branch of the company within a couple of weeks and also moving out of there shared flat. There was a few other little things, broken glasses, a lot of rowdy behaviour that wasn't looked to kindly on. I didn't cover myself in glory either as I was one of three people who threw up in the coach on the way back to base. We caused a little bit of damage to the coach and I had to pay a rather large portion of next wage packet to cover the costs of what I did. It came out later that the CEO wanted most of fired but Zane went to bat for us and managed to talk him down. 

The group slowly shrank, Sara left, Wahleed had gone a few months before, a lot of the student members of staff were coming to the end of there university lives and so moved on. Peter went back to Latvia and Alexi to Cyprus., Amanda ended up moving to Australia and becoming a midwife over there. Some of them I have no clue where they are now or what they've done with there lives but I do honestly miss them all in little ways. Why did I leave? I ended up becoming a Sabbatical Officer at the Student Union and launched the next phase of my life. Sometimes I do miss that buzz you got when it was a busy night and the place was packed, you could feel the energy pulsating through the place, I'm not sure if I could keep up long term at the job anymore as the hours were wild and the sleeping habits non existent during the busy periods but  at the time I was young and had the energy to do the job. When I went back to Luton for the first time in a years I walked by the old place, it's now a block of flats, like alot of the places I used to go to in the town but I still felt that little spark in my heart about all the good times we had working there, it truly was my golden generation of work colleagues.