Breathas Were Nice to Bar Staff in Re-O

This shouldn’t be news

OMG you guys chivalry is not dead, the breathas are nice now! Bartenders report that drunk students tended to be nicer than normal over the Re-O Week.

“Well, as a bartender I’m very used to pretty normal amount of verbal abuse from breathas, being cut off and slurs of poorly thought out insults,” said a bartender who worked at Re-O Week events. But over Re-O, “I didn’t get yelled at very much, [although it’s] very mean and aggressive normally.”

One particularly memorable moment was when a “[g]uy and his friend came up to bar, looked at the menu, then said ‘ah mate I’m just going to get some water and come back later’ and his friend agreed and they left.”

“I am grateful though,” the bartender said. “This is a nice blip, but normally the behaviour is pretty shitty.”

As proper journalists, Critic respected the scientific method and attempted to figure out why the breathas have suddenly cast aside their assholery. A third-year student reckoned that “people are probably just happier because they haven’t gotten sick of their mates yet and big dramas have been reset a little bit”. 

Another contributing factor could be all the drugs coursing through their systems. According to a bartender Critic spoke to, the drugs meant that they were hardly buying any alcohol. They also said that across the board there was a “large decrease in misbehaviour”, with approximately 65% of breathas exhibiting reform, with a further 25% kind of trying but still being annoying as shit. The last 10% were the ones who absolutely will not change and, unfortunately, bartenders across the city still had to deal with them being assholes over Re-O Week. 

While there was a sharp uptick in respectful behaviour, bartenders weren’t optimistic that this bizarre behaviour shift would continue for the rest of the semester. One bartender noted that breatha culture is still often “deeply toxic, incredibly misogynistic and blatantly disrespectful” and that they weren’t under the guise that anything would change.

This evolution in breatha behaviour hasn’t changed the number noise complaints in Re-O. A DCC spokesperson provided Critic with information that showed there was also a slight increase in the number of noise complaints compared with last year’s Re-O Week (going from 147 complaints to 152 complaints), but a decrease in seizures of speakers and Excessive Noise Directions. “This increase was expected and in general the number of complaints was very similar to Re-O week in 2019,” they said.

This article first appeared in Issue 11, 2020.
Posted 1:06pm Sunday 19th July 2020 by Alex Leckie-Zaharic.