A FIVE pound note drops behind the steps leading up to the bar. Angela's loss moves Geraldine to fall to her knees. Abandoning her drinks order she scrambles down and lighting her vision in the semi dark with her cigarette lighter, grasps about at customers' feet for the precious note. Angela's anxiety at dropping £5 is distressing, her relief at its retrieval even more so. To lose £5 half way through this young woman's shift is to lose almost half her wages.

Working as a lounge girl for a night in a Dublin bar, I am paid before I start work. The head bar man puts £12 into my hand. Geraldine, a bright, smiling British woman of 21 who has been told to show me the ropes, points out that this cash payment means you can "get dole" as well.

"It's fairly straightforward. You're just picking up empties, cleaning ash trays and getting drink orders." At 8 p.m. Geraldine's mop of blonde curls is pinned to her head under the weight of five hour's perspiration. "Aye, I started at 12, I had three hours off in the afternoon," she shrugs. "I'll finish at 3 a.m. You get more money [an extra £12] if you stay after midnight."

Thankful that I don't need £12 that badly, I take in the drinks ordering system.

"Really shout the order cos Keith [the bar man] won't hear you over the band," warns Geraldine. "He'll be screaming at you too," she says, as if to justify my yelling.

The £12 is my float. When a customer orders a round of drinks from me, I buy the round and get the change. Then, calculating from the change I get, I charge the customers the correct amount and give them their change.

"You hope they the customers will throw you a few pence." Geraldine shows me a trick she has evolved in her five months working here. She keeps a small pile of coins visible at the side of her fray. As she delivers drinks she hopes a few coins will be added to supplement it.

"It jogs the wee memory," she grins, tapping the side of her head. I can't help but think of kids on O'Connell Bridge hoping, with their boxes of coins, to jog a few memories of passers by.

"On a good night you could make £10 in tips but on a Monday you might only make £2 or £3." Groping through muddy beer mats on the floor for £5 guaranteed pay at the end of a long night's journey, quickly seems not only understandable but utterly necessary behaviour.

AS the first few punters come in, Angela, the third lounge girl on tonight, warns me of what to expect. "It's a blues band on tonight so it should be pretty busy. It can get fairly hectic and the worst thing is when you have customers screaming orders at you from all sides. You just have to say you'll get back to them ... Take a few orders at once if you can, but it's hard to remember them and to remember what change to give them if you have too many."

I opt to take one order at a time. By 10 p.m. the floor is fairly heaving and the walls almost rocking. Negotiating my way through a jiving mass of bodies with a tray of pint sized trophies held over heads, I wonder how long it will take for me to spill a tray load over someone, or over myself. Though I hardly notice at the time, by 12.30 my once proudly pressed blouse is sodden with a heady cocktail of cider, lager and Guinness.

My legs are aching, my face and back sweltering and my eyes streaming with the density of cigarette smoke emitted continuously into the atmosphere. I have made £7 in tips.

"It's not that busy tonight," remarks Geraldine.

"Some nights, when upstairs is open too, you're running up and down those stairs like a lunatic.

Geraldine has a degree in bio chemistry from a British University and came to Ireland hoping to get chemistry related work here.

"Most of the girls on the floor have degrees. I was picking up glasses before I went to uni; I was picking up glasses while I went to uni and now I'm picking them up again. It's soul destroying," she says.

"You'd only be doing this for the money and the money isn't even that good. It gives you enough, though, while you're working out what to do. The best thing about it is the other staff, good people."

To make what this bar pays up to a living wage the women depend on customers' goodwill and the State's blind eye. It is by no means a unique set up.

The State effectively shores up bar managers wage systems all over the country, according to SIPTU. By not enforcing minimum wage legislation, bars such as this can get away with paying £2 cash per hour in the knowledge that employees will supplement it with unemployment benefit.

"Employers are robbing the State and profiteering on the backs of underpaid employees," says Norman Croke of SIPTU.

The manager told me that he has very few problems getting staff. "The difficulty is getting good staff," he said.

I had no break between 8 p.m. and 1 a.m. I did hear, somewhere in the haze of exhaustion, a very good band.

"You do get to hear some good ones," nods Geraldine. One such band which played a while ago left some "class chocolates in the dressing room, which we ate," she adds. "That was good."

It's the simple things that make it better, in the life of a Dublin lounge girl.