The Dolly Parton Shift

For the past couple of days, I've been back in the old 9-5 swing of things at work. The problem is that it's the wrong 9-5! It seems the majority of the shifts I've been getting at the new Strip place have me punching in at 9pm and driving home after the sun makes an appearance over the mountains. That is going to take a lot of getting used to.

The trouble is that I'm so tired once I get home that I just go right to bed. However, for some damn reason, my body has decided that I shouldn't get more than 6 hours of sleep when I do this (usually more like 5), so that once it comes time to actually get ready for work later in the night, I better have gotten a nap in or I'm in big trouble!

Honestly, I'm not even sure why they schedule 9-5'ers. Fortunately, it doesn't seem like this place ever sends people home against their will. Unfortunately, that usually means that come 3-4am when most of the graveyard dealers arrive, they have way too many dealers for a casino that slowly becomes "dead". Last night was a great example in why they should probably eliminate the 9-5 swing shifters. I went on break at 3:20am and came back at 3:40am. My dice table had long been closed up, so basically I just arrive at the podium and wait for them to assign me a table. Since we had too many dealers at that point, back on break I went!! So I chilled in the break room for another 20 minutes and came back at 4am. Initially, they told me to "muck" on the roulette table, but it was a jammed up table for some reason and since I don't deal roulette and know zero of the payoffs, I wasn't much help as a "mucker". So after about a minute, I get tapped out and told to GO BACK ON BREAK! Yep, that would have essentially made an entire hour-long break. So instead of heading back to the break room, I just found the other (less busy) roulette table and mucked over there for 20 minutes. After that 20 minute stint of barely working while chatting with the other dealer, they sent me to a single-deck blackjack table for all of 20 minutes, gave me the early push at 4:40am, and home I went. So in case you weren't keeping track, I "worked" for exactly 40 minutes of my last 2 hours of my shift, not including the 20 minute vacation I took as a mucker on the semi-dead roulette table.

I don't want to complain about the 9-5 shift too much though. It's actually kind of nice going dead around 2-3am and not having much to do. I guess I could put myself on the Early Out (EO) list and get voluntarily sent home a couple of hours early, but what's the point? If any of you read Mikey's blog, you know that as soon as his casino grows dead at night, he usually gets his EO request and comes home, in some cases, 3 hours or more early. I never understood why he does this when I first started but figured I would just get to be the same way after dealing for a while. Well, its been well over a year since I started dealing, and I still don't feel the need to take EO at night. I guess its just something we're polar opposites on.

Don't get me wrong, the EO list isn't barren on a nightly basis as many fellow swing shifters sign up for it at at my place. However, the huge majority of those on the EO list are people who either have family obligations, people who have a 2nd part-time job, or both. The way I see it, why would I work my ass off at a jammed up dice table for the first 5 hours of my shift (which happened last night) just to get sent home as soon as things become slow and I can relax a little. I get paid the same either way. Even on days when the tips aren't all that great (let's take $80 for example), if you add the tips to the minimum wage base pay, that's still around $17 an hour I'm making during every hour of my shift, busy or not. I think if you offered almost anyone $17 an hour to take breaks every 20 minutes and just stand around people-watching or watching the bar TVs, they'd take it! Besides, what am I going to do after getting home early at 2am? Nothing that would warrant giving up $50 in pay for, I'm sure.

Another thing I've tried to take advantage of at my new place is the kick-ass employee dining room (EDR). Unlike my previous 2 jobs in Henderson and on Boulder Highway, the EDR at my current place actually has some very tasty offerings. If I get in there during lunch/dinner time, it has a meat carving station, which is replaced by a made-to-order omelette station in the morning. The trouble is that it is a country mile from my table games area because it is shared with the casino next door. So I usually get to work early, stuff my face, work my 8 hour shift and then re-commence with the aforementioned face-stuffing after work. In doing this, I almost never touch ANYTHING in my fridge/cupboards during work-days, which obviously cuts my grocery budget down dramatically!

Okay, enough rambling. I work the 9-5 again tonight, starting on dice, and then I'm on-call for Friday night. I do hope they call me in because the weekend shifts are usually much better for tokes than weekdays. I just hope I can hone my nap-taking skills a little.