Yet another Mardi Gras is upon us. With its arrival comes hundreds of thousands of screaming, drinking, breast-exposing visitors that will hurl millions into our economy through alcohol and jester hat sales. They are our best and worst friends. They are the tourists.

I have a right to be bitter. For the past four years, I have been dependant on the New Orleans’ tourists for my livelihood. I have bartended at a St. Charles Avenue restaurant, two downtown hotels and now on a riverboat. Needless to say, none of these establishments are frequented by locals.

There I am, whoring myself to those who are looking for that “mystical, authentic New Orleans experience.” I personally don’t know what that experience entails, but I assume it involves pirates and prostitutes.

The hotels offered me the finest gamut of tourist personalities. You get the vacationing families, the spring-breakers, the lonely businessmen and my favorite, the conventioneers. These people are the pinnacle of tourist evolution. All it takes is one hurricane on the corporate card to get the party started. These are the people looking for the “real New Orleans.” They fall off their bar stools, then ask where the real locals hang – as long as the places the real people go are within a two-block radius of Bourbon Street and dark enough to urinate on a wall.

While bartending during Jazzfest last year, I had a quasi-famous celebrity ask me how I was able to balance college with Bourbon Street. This is the moment at which every sympathetic urge in your body wants you to reach across the bar and slap him across the face.

I once had a customer convince himself that Bourbon Street was the reason the Saints were awful. Now, I am not one to make excuses for why the Saints are bad (Aaron Brooks), but I am fairly certain they are not consuming hand grenades and hanging off balconies before kickoff.

Assuming that someone who lives in New Orleans always goes to Bourbon Street is in the same vein as saying New Yorkers hang out at Times Square on their weekends or that the people of Los Angeles can’t stay away from Venice Beach.

The tourists have warped my life. I traveled to Dublin last month and, compliments of my experience in New Orleans’ service industry, spent my time self-conscious that Dubliners were looking down on me, judging the foolish American lost on their streets.

I avoided wearing novelty leprechaun hats and drinking green beer. I didn’t even ask anybody where Bono was, but I still felt that they could see right through my façade. I doubt the visitors second-line dancing on the riverboat to “When The Saints Come Marching In” feel the same hesitation I experienced across the pond.

I love traveling. Everyone should take time to see the world beyond his or her area code. I also appreciate the vast amount of money the tourists bring into our city, but after years of catering to their every whim and humoring their every “clever” anecdote, I find myself ready to snap.

With the arrival of yet another Carnival season, I am again forced to wear any and all beads offered, regardless of how they may clash with my bowtie and cuff links, grinning like a fool and pandering for spare change. There I will remain, a casualty of the system, shaking my tip jar like little orphan Oliver.

Adam Hennessey is a communications senior from Allentown, Penn.