Second Shift, March 19th, 2100-0215

“Are these shoes inappro-?”
“Are they inappropriate? Yes, and you knew they were, but you wore them anyway.”

This is how the shift started. Somebody walked by me and said that I couldn’t wear my shoes. I asked Simonida, a tall, skeletal, Eastern Bloc woman with leathery skin and skunk like dye job, who was the supervisor for my first shift, then told me the above. She assumed that I was trying to play dumb and get away with wearing all black canvas sneakers, a violation of the employee dress code. She was convinced that I was lying to her. After trying to convince her that I didn’t realize the shoes were against regulation she told me it didn’t matter anyway.

This shift was quite slow and I was sent home 2 hours and 45 minutes early. I was assigned to the game 3 Card Poker for the majority of the shift and of the 5 hours I was there I spent at least an hour standing at an empty table gazing around the sparsely populated casino. Every now and again someone would come up to the table, place a bet and sit down. The supervisor would then have to take the lock off of the chip tray and I would deal usually four or five hands before the player would lose all of their money and leave. The chip tray was locked up again and I would begin waiting. When there is no one playing and the table is ‘dead’ the protocol is to fan a deck of cards on the table and look inviting to potential gamblers. I was told to practice my fanning and I did so for about ten minutes before my supervisor said that I should ‘Fan it better.’ She then took the cards away and did it herself. I think my cards looked nicer.

Throughout my shift one young man kept coming back over and over again, each time saying “One more bet.” The first time he played he was making $150 dollar bets. He ended up winning $750 on one wager and then left only to come back a few minutes later to play $5 bets. He told me this time it was “Just for fun.” He would stay for about five minutes before leaving, making it almost to the cashier window and then coming back to play some more.

Any game in the casino that uses a deck of cards also uses a shuffling machine. On the rare occasion when a shuffling machine breaks down there is a very strict and open shuffling procedure. The procedure is designed to show the customer that the cards are being shuffled as thoroughly and as randomly possible. Despite this, one of the most common phrases you will hear at a table in a casino is “I can’t get a hand from this fucking dealer!” Which is usually followed by a throwing of cards or slapping of table. There is a firm belief that the dealers have some effect on what cards come up when and they are usually the subject of the players frustration. I am not sure why dealers are not completely replaced by video terminals. An automated computer dealer could do the job faster and more efficiently. It may be because players feel more comfortable losing money to a face because assigning blame to a dealer hinders the realization that they should be blaming themselves for the miserable gambling losses that make them the type of people who sit at a casino table from one in the morning til four.

At one point in my shift there was one player playing at my table when another approached the table. He asked me earlier if I was Italian and also told me I was doing a very bad job. I am not sure if he was kidding or not. Just as he was sitting down I flipped over the dealer’s hand revealing a flush and he stood back up and ran away.

In the break room a dealer and supervisor were discussing their recent t-shirt finds. One bought a t-shirt that on the front says “I’m 25 cents” and on the back says “Take me from here” with an arrow pointing down. The other had just got a t-shirt which had “De-Virginizer” splayed on the front. They were both very excited about them.

After my table was empty for about half an hour and the casino was grinding to a halt, I was shuffled around from table to table for about 20 minutes. Each time they would get ready to open a table and then shut it down minutes into the opening. There is a somewhat detailed procedure which goes along with opening and closing a gaming table so each time this happened I was taken off and moved to another table because they did not want to wait for me to go through the process correctly. After this happened three times, I was sent on break and then ten minutes later told to go home.