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.