The DoCSoc Bar Night System
Pete Hamilton,  26 February 2014

For those of you awesome enough to have attended our previous bar night, you'll know we started using a slightly different scheme for how we handle free drink tokens. I want to explain clearly how this works and why we're doing it.

Last Time

For those of you awesome enough to have attended our previous bar night, you'll know we started using a slightly different scheme for how we handle free drink tokens. I want to explain clearly how this works and why we're doing it.

Although a few people got confused (alcohol can do that to you), by and large, the new system worked really well. We were able to give at least one free drink to almost 3X as many people as we'd ever had at bar nights before, all for a bar tab that was only marginally higher than usual.

The issues we had came from a communication issue rather than an organisational one. Essentially, we needed to make it absolutely clear that the money on the door was to get in and qualify you for free drinks, not as payment for 4 drinks tokens. We didn't so some mild chaos ensued at the beginning of the evening.

How it's Gonna Work

1. You turn up and hand over 3 of your finest English pounds.
2. We, in turn, stamp you, to say you're entitled to receive up to 4 free drinks.
3. You go and find one of the handsome looking DoCSoc committee who is holding the tokens and they'll mark your stamp, give you a token and send you on your way
4. Drink your drink. If you can, find a friend, it's less sad that way.
5. Repeat 3 & 4 until you run out of tokens and/or fall over
6. Eventually we will run out of tokens and this may happen before you have had 4 drinks this is expected and intentional. To prevent this, turn up early. We won't be giving you 4 tokens all at once.

Note: If by some miracle we don't run out of tokens too fast and can support everyone for 4 drinks all night, you can keep returning to the DoCSoc committee member (who by this point will probably be throwing tokens in the air and singing out "It ain't about the money, money, money...") until you've had all four drinks or we run out of tokens

Why are we doing it this way?

A few reasons really:

1. It means almost everyone gets at least one free drink, this is more fun for everyone overall
2. It means people can't take 4 tokens to the bar and immediately order all four drinks. It clogs up the bar and at least one will get knocked over during the evening.
3. Not everyone uses up all 4 tokens - this means we can essentially 'donate' potentially unused tokens to needy fellow students.
4. It means we can keep a handle on how many tokens are floating around and how quickly we're running out, also we can refuse to give people tokens if they're in a complete state...

If you have an issue with any of this, think it's just mental or can think of something better, feel free to kick off a discussion below.

Otherwise, see you there!

-- Pete