Bartending on New Year’s Eve is a singular experience.

If you’re single, your New Year’s Eve plans can signal how exciting your life is. Sit at home with friends and watch TV while drinking wine: Pathetic. Crash the Hell’s Angels’ party and get into a fistfight because you kissed Snake’s girlfriend at Midnight: Awesome and Dangerous.

Since I’m much more likely to do the former, I prefer working on New Year’s Eve. That way I don’t have to fret over what I’ll wear, whom I’m going to smooch, how much I’ll drink, all that jazz. I can just stand behind the bar and watch many strangers get hammered and make fools of themselves.

Which people do as on almost no other day of the year (besides, obviously, St. Patrick’s Day and maybe Jour des Morts). The view from behind the bar is almost always entertaining, but on the last day of the year it becomes practically voyeuristic. People drink fast, drink hard, almost as if they’re on a deadline. "I must be in the bag before the countdown!"

They also often feel some weird compulsion to drink pretentiously. Martini glasses get a workout like no other night. People who normally consume little more than Coronas and the occasional Kamikaze shot pound Grey Goose martinis or single malt scotches as if the holiday turns everybody into James Bond.

But the oddest thing about New Year’s Eve is that it seems as if almost NOBODY ever actually has a good time! In the weeks prior, I hear people moaning as to their plans, then everybody spends the first day of the new year nursing a nasty hangover (thank God we have Alka-Seltzer’s new Morning Remedy! It is truly a new millennium!).

And on the night itself, the pressure just turns people into jerks. Cases in point from my December 31st:

The bar where I tend was sold out, I was working the front room with another bartender and two servers, whose job it was to pour and distribute the free champagne for the midnight toast. As always, a lot of people downed theirs in advance of the toast and then demanded more. Three such ladies approached me at the bar looking for refills. I had a case of unopened bottles at my feet, but no glasses and other things to do, so I suggested they look elsewhere. One of them instantly became belligerent, so I sighed and opened a bottle for them, grabbing highball glasses to fill. Just then, a group of bellicose lads arbitrarily decided it was time to countdown, even though my watch showed five minutes to go. The angry patron said I was "lame", I told her it still wasn’t midnight, but quickly poured the champagne, slopping a little onto her hand as she held her empty glass. At which point, with midnight now practically upon us, she flicked the champagne off her hand and onto my face and called me an "asshole."

Now, this entrance into the New Year was stellar enough. But not ten minutes later, it was followed by another delightful encounter.

New Year’s Eve is the ultimate Weekend Warrior’s Holiday. Amateur drinkers with no social skills crash normally enjoyable venues and just don’t know how to act or interact. And on New Year’s Eve, they usually are out the door as soon as the clock’s struck twelve. This happened with gusto at my bar. Now, Dec. 31st was very cold hereabouts, and so our relatively small coat rack was overflowing. At about 12:10, I saw a young woman wildly THROWING coats onto the floor in order to find hers. I touched her arm and asked her to please stop. She spun around, the devil in her eyes, and spit, "WE hung up our coats like NORMAL people, FUCK YOU!"

Well, Happy New Year to you, too!

Of course, I’m not even mentioning the people we had to cut off, the jerk who tried to start the fight, the guy who stalked the band that night, the vomit in the bathroom and on the sidewalk and the debauchery that came after we were closed and the staff finally got to let off OUR steam.

My Point? New Year’s Eve sucks. I think we need to rethink how we celebrate the end of each year. Maybe rather than unabashed revelry, we should retire to places of study to contemplate our follies and figure out how to make ourselves, and hence, the world a better place for all!

Yeah. Right.