Third Shift, March 22nd 1900-0245

Shift 3 1900-0245

I was called in early for this shift. There was no explanation why, but I imagine it was because of a sick call. At the site orientation everyone there was told that the amount of sick days taken by casino employees is approximately double the national average. This, I imagine, is due to two things: Stocking graveyard shifts with employees is difficult in any business that pays as poorly as the casino industry and also because the constant handling of chips makes dealers much more susceptible to illness. The chips pass through many hands every day and are not cleaned regularly. This means that they are very prone to picking up saliva, grease, sweat and whatever else the twenty people who handled that chip that day happened to have on their hands. However, according to a health and safety orientation given on my first day the most common contaminate on the chips is urine. I don't know where that information comes from, but tt is not uncommon to have chips fused together by some dark greasy substance that has the consistency of earwax and the look of snot. Because of this people at the casino wash their hands religiously. I heard a woman advising a new dealer that if she didn’t soap down her hands every time she started a break she could expect to be constantly getting urinary track infections. This didn’t strike me as fear mongering, not only because the patrons of aren’t exactly the Howard Hughes type but also many of them keep their chips in their pockets and have the habits of playing with them constantly, rubbing them around their hands like stress relievers. I have had to handle piles of chips that were warm and moist to the touch.

I had come into this shift with the intention of being more forceful with customers and being more direct with keeping them inline. For the previous two shifts I had allowed gamblers to swear and argue at the table, which is something I, as the dealer, am supposed to stop. So decided to regulate the table with more authority. I did not get a chance to test out my new customer service strategy. I think because I was on an earlier shift the customers were not the hardcore gambling type. They took their losses with much less strife than the people I had dealt with previously. Also, it seemed like I was paying out a lot more than usual and people don’t seem to go on tilt if they are losing their money slowly. Even though the people were not as angry as I hoped they would be they still were anxious to blame me when things didn’t go the way they wanted. During streaks of losses passing people would ask the players if the table was any good and they would reply ‘This dealer is no good, he is unlucky.’ or something to that effect. Whenever this happened I cheerfully responded telling the customers that it had nothing to do with me. This always seemed to annoy them. They would stare at me saying nothing waiting for me to deal the next hand that they presumed I had taken the time to arrange. But because of the slower rate of losses the players were going through no one swore at me and the behavior was mild at best.

Today the profit shares were paid out to the employees who invest a portion of their pay cheques into Great Canadian Casino stocks. GCC offers their shares at three quarters of the cost to employees who have been working with the company for over three months. The amount of money an employee received apparently not only relies on the performance and profits of GCC but also on the amount of hours and types of jobs you perform for the company. I am still unclear on how the plan works, but the consensus in the break room was that everyone got screwed over on their shares. One of the people who was much more vocal than the others was a white woman (one of the few who work the graveyard shift) who said that on the previous pay out she only been contributing for one month received around $40 dollars. For this year she had been contributing for the full year and was only paid out $210. Everyone else seemed to have a similar situation and on every break there was lamenting about how poorly the employees were treated and how miserable the company was.

There was a photocopied newspaper article posted in the break room about the difficult year the casino industry had just experienced. A spokes person for GCC stated that due to weather, lower return per bet and other unexpected circumstances the profits from the previous year were down. This was also something I had heard stressed by the higher-ups during my various training sessions. Many people were trying to convince my fellow new dealers and me that the casino industry in BC was not a surefire cash cow, despite all we had heard. This attitude was not present with the dealers or lower level supervisors, but people who had more status in the company were very defensive about the business and were always quick to point out how hard it was to operate as a casino and how integrity was the most important part. It is always reassuring when someone directly informs you that they have integrity.

The woman mentioned above was particularly outspoken about this and almost everything else that she spoke of. She was friendly and seemed very nice, but she talked like someone who was trying to do a stand-up comedy routine, swearing constantly and spewing off terrible lines about nothing. She addressed me as ‘new guy’ and when she asked how I liked the job so far I told her that I was finding the graveyard shift difficult.
“Yeh, tell me about it. Graveyard shift licks dirty ass.” She replied.
The conversation ended there.
Even when no one was listening she was shouting monologues into the air about how horrible the job and pay was. Whenever she could she would chime in on other people’s conversations. Two of the dealers started talking about their girlfriends and she started immediately.
“Women are fucking crazy and I know, I am one of them. Sometimes my boyfriend will be like ‘You’re fucking weird’ and I’m like ‘I know. I’m a girl’ and I am always doing weird shit. Women are fucking crazy, you shouldn’t deal with them.” All of this was rattled off like a speed freak.
She often walked out of the room still talking only to reenter talking about something else.

The rest of my shift was uneventful and slow.

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.

First Shift, March 18th, 2100-0430

Yesterday was my first shift at the casino. I arrived 20 minutes early as instructed and set myself up: washed my hands, put on my apron and tie, sat and relaxed in the break room. The break room was dilapidated: the ceiling had a huge leak in it which had ate through the office style ceiling boards, the fluorescent lights hummed, the lockers were tagged and decorated with the remnants of scraped off stickers and people had left their food and news papers scattered about on the break room tables.

I talked to some of the dealers and supervisors in the break room. None of them seemed to have any interest in me and only talked to me when I initiated the conversation. Everyone was friendly. I was asked several times if I was nervous. One of the dealers described his first shift and said how he was terrible and very nervous, but that it was because he cared that he was nervous. The nervousness was an indication of how much you cared. I realized then that I was not nervous at all.

All of the dealers were Asian, most of them very young and over half of them women.

I don’t remember what I dealt on my first few hands. I made mistakes and called the supervisor to correct them and nothing detrimental occurred. The table felt exactly the same as the training school, but slightly more relaxed. I told some of the players that I was new, but no one seemed interested.

The dealing, as I expected, was very boring, but the time went by quite quickly. The customers for the most part chatted idly or kept a dead stare on the cards as they came out of the shuffling machine. I went on five or six, fifteen-minute breaks. Breaks only happen in fifteen-minute blocks.

The casino floor was very hot and there was music playing that sounded like it was taken from the play list of an early 90’s hockey game DJ set. “Pump up the Jam” was playing along with other cheesy previous hits that people tend to forget. When music is playing I have a tendency to tune out and focus on it which might make working there difficult because it seems like they were playing the type of music designed strictly to annoy people.

The customers were as I remembered from my previous trips to casinos. There isn’t much diversity at the table. There are angry people, people who tell everyone else how to play and the ones who keep their mouth shut and ignore everybody. If someone is playing outside of convention the angry people openly swear and harass them. They insult them right to their face and have no hesitation about calling them terrible or idiots. If they are insulting one the of people who don’t talk the exchange stops at the mute player, but if it is an angry person versus and angry person the words go back and forth a little longer. During training I was told that I should step in when this is happening, but the exchange seems so calm and regular. If I were to intervene it would have felt like I was disturbing the players in their usual gaming experience.

One thing which I did not account for was how terrible gamblers smell. There was an acrid mixture of B.O. with coffeecigarette breath that made the table smell like a rundown nursing home.

Somewhere in the middle of my shift I started dealing out terrible cards and people kept losing over and over again with no breaks. Most people had their eyes glued to the table and kept pushing back chips when I took them away, but there was one man who looked to be middle eastern and had a naval style hair cut - shaved on the sides short and slicked back on top – and large mole on his face, who every time he lost looked up at me and tried to meet my eyes. He was not doing this out of disbelief and wanting to commiserate with me about the bad string of cards that were appearing, he was doing this because he wanted me to see how angry he was. He lost slowly for the first hour and began to curse under his breath, by the third hour he began to swear directly at me. His voice was soft and raging.
“This fucking dealer. Unfuckingbelievable. I can’t fucking belive this. What a fucking joke.”
Ten minutes before he left the table, probably four hours into a streak of losses he said “This is how it is, huh? You just rob and rob the poor. How do you live with yourself?”
I wasn’t sure what to say, because he was genuinely angry and I didn’t want to make it worse. I told him I am able to live with myself because I don’t get paid very well. It probably wasn’t the best thing to say, but he didn’t have any reaction.

On my first night dealing, I must have taken thousand and thousands of dollars out of peoples hands. I do not feel any remorse about this, but I did have a mixture of sympathetic and irritated feelings towards the customers. I was continually dealing out strings of bad cards and there was nothing people could do to change the outcomes of the hands, but they still kept piling money onto the betting boxes in front of them. It was like administering voluntary shock treatment to people, and they just kept running back time after time, hoping that the next time they wouldn’t get electrocuted. I wanted to tell them to stop and walk away. When the man started swearing at me I wanted to ask him why he was questioning me when he was the jackass who sat at a blackjack table for 4 hours straight and dropped $500. These people are retarded and the casino is there to take advantage of them, and I am a facilitator of the casino. During my training the instructors kept stressing that the casino industry is one of integrity and after half of a shift it is pretty easy to see that is complete bullshit.

I don’t know if it was because I was dealing out poor cards or because I was not doing my job well, but the tips were scarce. For eight hours I was there I pulled in around $10. Half of which came from one man when he managed to double up his winnings, by playing, according to the other players at least, very poorly. It will be interesting to see my tip share at the end of the week.

Halfway through my shift my back started to feel like it had been beat upon with a bag of oranges. The table is about hip height and I have to bend over or slouch somewhat awkwardly to deal the cards. Hopefully my back muscles will readjust or the next few months are going to be very painful.