Ask the average person what the most obnoxious holiday in the world is and 82% will answer New Year's Eve.  (I just made that up.)  

Doubtless my distaste (loathing) for this holiday came from my years of working as a waiter, bartender and, worst of all manager (I say worst of all because my managing years were the times when I had to deal with the mess of it all without receiving a dollar in tips).  

I wasn't always like this.  After high school, instead of going to college or getting a job, I joined a band.

I spent the better part of the late 80s and early 90s in a van (which I almost died in, twice), traveling from Milwaukee to St. Louis, from Indianapolis to Iowa, every December 31st we had a gig.  That was fun.

But beside those four years...

The worst of the worst of them wasn't some nightmare story about vomiting  bar patrons or saloon-style brawls (even though both of those happened).  The worst was the most innocuous.  Working in an Pan-Asian restaurant that year, I'd been elb0w deep in the ice bin most of the night, making Mai-Tai after Mai-Tai (my shirt stained pink from collar to waist) when, about two minutes before midnight (though I didn't know exactly what time it was), one of my better tipping customers handed me his coat check ticket and asked me to grab his stuff.  

Being happy to get out from behind the bar, I grabbed it, ran to the closet, where our coat check girl for the evening has escaped from for the moment to grab a drink and yell happy new year, and began rummaging. The room was a disaster, the simple method of numerical order apparently having been abandoned.  His coat was nowhere to be found, but in the back of the closet was a pile of coats tossed onto a chair.  I began sorting, some of them falling onto the floor.

As I got down on my knees (I'm sure I looked like I was beginning to pray) the room behind me erupted in cheers and horns, and obnoxiously enough, an a cappella version of Auld Lang Syne. I stayed on my knees for a moment, staring into the floor and the pile of coats, wondering how I'd allowed myself to reach this point, again, where I was little more than a servant while almost everyone around me lavished themselves in revelry.