The perils and pleasures of bartending in Antarctica (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The perils and pleasures of bartending in Antarctica (2017)

atlasobscura.com

95 pointszdw26 comments

I imagine best part about working in Antarctica is having to watch "The Thing" after the last flight before the Winter darkness leaves:

https://gizmodo.com/these-south-pole-scientists-who-watch-th...

I recently finished watching a thriller set in Antarctica (The Head) and they do this in a scene! Didn't know it was real.

Hiroyuki Sanada does a turn in a TV series called Helix, which is The Thing but what if scientific hubris made it much worse. It was cut short after 2 seasons. The first season is in the Antarctic, the second sees a different site in the arctic play out a similar containment incident.

I worked on Mt Erebus and we would often watch it when we got stuck in a storm. Excellent movie. Good times.

We would also watch South of Sanity https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2243151/ .

I’ve gotta say, the American bars in the Antarctic were pretty staid affairs in the grand scheme of things - lots of people getting quietly smashed in corners - but the guys at Vernadsky knew how to party - zamagonka made from their potato stocks, followed by skinny dipping with the penguins and a session in the sauna, followed by more zamagonka, until nobody is left standing.

A colleague and friend of mine just started a 6 week stay at an Antarctic base for research. They was telling me that there used to be an open bar there, but it has been closed due to too many cases of harassment. Instead, you have to request and reserve alcohol that you want to consume during your stay. The awkward part is you have to get your research advisor to sign off on it. In the end, they reserved the maximum number of "alcohol units" for their length of stay. This amounted to: a handle of whiskey, 4 bottles of wine, and 17 cans of beer. "Enough for one fun night" I joked!

> closed due to too many cases of harassment.

Yes, some say that the reported 70/30 male/female split among the Antarctic employees, along with a macho culture, and liberal access to alcohol - that being one of the most effective drugs at inflaming emotions, social and sexual passions, lowering inhibitions, etc - creates an Antarctic atmosphere that is quite a nasty experience for some people, particularly women e.g.

Discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/162nadz/women_w... Source: https://apnews.com/article/antarctica-sexual-harassment-assa...

"Monahon, 35, is one of many women who say the isolated environment and macho culture at the United States research centre in Antarctica have allowed sexual harassment and assault to flourish."

"But the problem goes beyond the harassment, the Associated Press found. In reviewing court records and internal communications, and in interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, the AP uncovered a pattern of women who said their claims of harassment or assault were minimised by their employers, often leading to them or others being put in further danger."

I haven't seen it, but apparently the 2020 documentary "Picture a Scientist" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_a_Scientist) also looks at this phenomenon.

I work with a lot of glaciologists and I think another part of it is that the field is dominated by people who would rather be skiing. That is, they don't so much care about the science as much as the adventure. And adventure bros seem to also overlap a lot with rapists. Coupled with the power of "granting adventure" to impressionable students, postdocs eager to succeed, etc. And you have a great environment to have rape everywhere even without alcohol.

Perhaps isolated places such as this would have been better off if they had stayed single-sex institutions, and not forced integration which seems to cause more harm than good. Perhaps not so P.C. to suggest, but something to think about.

Astrophysicists and absinthe! Another data point toward the "if only I had pursued my undergraduate degree further" timeline.

I can see how the weight limits would move the social needle: you would want the maximum bang for your buck, the most dram (of alcohol) to the gram, so reasonably people would go for the high-proof stuff, then find ways to cut it down with more innocuous items available on base, leading to various cocktails, and from there, a bar.

Doing the math[1], I don't -think- they were bringing much in personal allowance. The other source was "buying from station stores" and I imagine the bulk came from there.

Equally since absinthe is unlikely to be in the official station stores, that was likely just "a couple bottles" shared one night, not sll year round.

[1] they had 125 lbs (circa 57kg) of luggage or the -year-. I'm not sure if that includes clothing. But even if it's only "incidentals" that's not much at all. Sure you might include a bottle or two for special occasions, but nothing like the volume to drink every night for a year.

> Broughton sat behind the bar and put his feet up against the beer case. Inevitably, someone asked for a beer. Glaring, Broughton handed one over. “Don’t get used to that,” he said.

Am I right to guess that this is because weak alcohol, like beer, is a hot commodity?

“Don’t get used to me serving you when you can just get the drinks yourself”

My reading of the article is that he wasn't actually the bartender when he initially entered the bar. He says that "the only seat left was behind the bar," implying that he was just another patron of the bar. If that's the case, the attitude of "don't get used to that" is because as just another patron, it's not his job to get other people drinks.

The Perils and Pleasures of Bartending in Antarctica (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19005664 - Jan 2019 (44 comments)

(2017) per notation at end of article.

Added. Thanks!

Not trying to stir up controversy or detract from the interesting article, but I find the verb "to bartend" and its various tenses to be unwieldy and cumbersome. I greatly prefer to verb "to tend bar" in its stead. Am I weird?

I mean, I find bartending no more unwieldy than woodworking. :-)

Indeed, "working wood" sounds a bit funny

if you're funny, it's generally easier to work the wood

Or use the verb "be/am" as in "I am behind the sticks" :)

“Tending bar” puts more emphasis on what one might argue is the more important part of the phrase. No one is there for the tender. Consider versus “woodworking”: you want the work, not the hunk of wood.

> Am I weird?

If you’re American, idk about “weird” but definitely in the very small minority. Bartend is used as naturally as any other verb by almost all native speakers, as far as I can tell.

I’m not sure about other countries.

Huh I have exactly the opposite prior here. I was surprised by the Ngram though:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=to+bartend%2C+...

Looks like over the past 200 years, "tend bar" was strongly preferred, but since the turn of the millennium, "bartend" has been catching up, and eventually overtook "tend bar". Similar results if you look at the infinitive or various cases, with the exception that "bartending" has been more popular than "tending bar" since the 1950s.

I am with you, for what it’s worth. I would be tending the bar and frowning at anyone who asked for “gin and tonics” until they corrected themselves.

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