Blown a Gasket

Okay, so my day today on Thursday isn't what I expected. My plan was to get the car to the shop at 7am so it could be done in time to drive to the ear doctor by 10:30am. The "low coolant" light flashed the other day and I discovered that my coolant was running low (and was dirty). So I took it in today to have the battery replaced and to get a coolant flush. Well, much to my dismay, when I went to pick it up at 10am, I found out I had a blown head gasket! Ugh!!!!

So a service guy drove me to the doctor and I immediately decided to call in sick to work on my way to the doctor. I still think I might have been able to get shuttled to work and only miss about an hour, but I was in no mood to go to work anyway!

I'm actually in a decent mood though all things considered. The doctored cleared a TON of wax out of both of my ears and they feel like they're brand new at this point. I had NO IDEA AT ALL how bad it was. Honestly, the sound of the keyboard keys being typed sound different, the cell phone ring scared the crap out of me earlier because it was so loud, even the sound of my own voice sounds way different! It makes me wonder just how long this has been going on. It couldn't have been a matter of months, but years!

So even though I'm out a bunch of money for the car repair, we're still planning on heading up to Mesquite tonight after Danielle gets home from work. Wish us luck.

Burnt

The title says it all. If my mind hasn't turned to complete mush, I believe the past 4 weeks have been 6-day work weeks, which means I've had 4 days off in the past month!

Here's a couple signs that I know I've been burned out for a while. First, I've been very hesitant to pick up extra shifts. I don't really know why its so hard for me to turn down shifts, but I think ever since I was abused at Sunset Station for 9 months while only getting 2 or 3 shifts a week, turning down ANY shift now seems like craziness! Last week I voluntarily worked an extra day ONLY because the time of the shift was acceptable AND it was a shift at the better sister property to my casino.

The other two signs of burn-out are that I'm no longer really excited to go in on dice days AND I'm completely sick and tired of explaining how to play craps to newby players. Honestly folks, why do brand new players insist on coming to me every single day (is it because I'm the only one who looks like English is my first and only language) and asking how to play the game???? One thing about brand new players is that the overwhelming majority of them are TERRIBLE tippers, so it honestly is NOT worth my time and effort to teach them to the best of my ability if their only intention is to buy-in for a measly $20 to "try out their new activity", ignore most of what I try to teach, lose their buy-in in 5 minutes and leave without any tip at all. After about a dozen of those types of interactions per week, I just don't care if you know the game or not. Play or don't, just don't waste my time! At this point I've given myself a rule-of-thumb: try to help out new players with helping them get proper odds and make proper bets ONCE, but if they chooose to ignore me or are too stupid to use applied learning, I'll become a robot and book whatever bet they want. Gone are the days of reminding every damn player on my side of the table to make their odds bet even on the 5 and 9 to save them a whole 50 cents worth of breakage!

Past the normal rant stuff though, I've also been stressed out this past week due to a medical ailment. It seems for the past 6 months or so, wax has been building up in both of my ears and I've had issues with my ears being clogged, on and off, for a while now. Well, last week I finally decided to try to do something about it and I bought some over-the-counter wax removal medicine. After the third attempt (which was last Thursday night) to use the stuff, it COMPLETELY clogged up my left ear and did not help my right ear in the slightest. So I bit the bullet on Monday and went in to see my regular doctor, who basically looked at my ears for 2 seconds and comfirmed my left ear is completely blocked (about 1/3 of the canal is full of wax). So Thursday I have an appointment with an ear/nose/throat specialist to have both my ears cleaned, hopefully taking car of that impacted wax in my left ear for good!

I can't tell you how maddening it is to suddenly lose most of your hearing while working in a casino. On non-dice days its not so bad because most of your communication is the kind of banter between dealer and player that is not really essential to the job. But on dice days, its EXTREMELY difficult due to needing to communicate with both the players AND the other dealers/box man. Late bets by the players, "call" bets, normal bets like "34 inside" or "27 across", etc. all take on an extra bit of complexity when you can barely make out what they are saying. On Tuesday, I caught myself guessing a lot and pressing people's bets on instinct as opposed to actually hearing them tell me to press. It never really came back to bite me, but it sure will be nice to put this behind me once and for all Thursday.

So the light is finally approaching. By Thursday night, I should be hearing okay and finishing up the last shift in the casino until next Tuesday. Danielle and I are leaving Vegas Thursday night after my shift to go to Mesquite, then on to Zion National Park Friday-Sunday. I took off an extra day next Monday just for good measure. NONE of these days are paid (I asked them to be unpaid as to save up vacation for later in the year), so I guess its a good thing I've worked so much these past couple of months.

I'm thinking the next time I update the blog will be with details about how the hiking went at Zion.

Man on the Silver Mountain

A Rare Update

Just a few updates since I last checked in for anyone still reading. The work schedule has been pretty interesting/crazy lately. So here's what's happening. Apparently a relatively new big wig has decided that as many tables as possible should be open at my joint at all hours of the day. The three biggest impacts this has on my dealing schedule are:

1. It looks like I may be averaging 11 days per pay period for a while. The way it seems they are working things is that the part-time employees (me) are getting 6-day work weeks when the full-timers are working 5, and then its reversed the following week with the full-timers getting 6 and the part-timers getting 5. For good or bad, it seems like the days of me sweating out getting 3 days per week are a distant memory! I think they are still hiring some more dealers to possibly try to bring everyone down to 5-day work weeks (casinos still HATE paying overtime), but I hope they don't hire too many dealers in case this experiment doesn't work out.

2. With all of the extra tables being open, they are now staggering the shift starts during day shift to include shifts that begin at 10am, 11am, 12noon, 1pm and 2pm. Guess who seems to be getting the 2pm-10pm shifts on every damn weekend? Yep, me and a consistent portion of the part-timers. Since the "normal" swing shift dealer comes in at 8pm, I can now claim that I'm 25% swing shift, which I guess gets me into some kind of club! This might sound insane, but the thought has actually crossed my mind a couple times lately of maybe transferring to graveyard. I don't think ANY graveyard dealers are working past 12noon, which means a consistent graveyard shift would be 4am-12noon, which is more like a day shift then the 2pm-10pm "day shift". There is much more down time on graveyard as well, which I don't really think I'd mind at this point. Truthfully though, I don't think I'm really serious about this thought for various reasons.

3. Unfortunately, it seems all of these extra dealers and tables being open isn't bringing in the action that would be hoped for and our tips are going down because of it. The main irritant is that during the week, any blackjack table that sits dead for a little while will automatically become a $5 table, which absolutely sucks. $5 tables are a lot of work for no payoff, except to just put your time in and get out of there 8 hours later. One thing I do have to admit though is that even though the tips are going down, they really aren't plummeting....they're just kind of easing down a little. This means that the extra days I'm getting coupled with the fact that I have less free time to spend $ means my bank account is growing noticeably these past couple of months. In fact, the 2-week paycheck that included the normally slow 2 weeks surrounding tax time actually covered an entire month's of expenses with a couple hundred left over!

Other updates include my plan to go to a couple concerts in the approaching months. I just purchased 2 tickets (Danielle and myself) for the Rush concert that will happen at MGM on August 14th. I'm planning on TWO Roger Waters concerts in the fall, one while in Ohio in Cleveland and the other on black Friday at the MGM. In relation to the huge amount of shifts that are being doled out, I've decided that my policy of trying to keep zero points on my attendance sheet will be going out the window. I've been at my current casino for over two years now and I've only called in "sick" once, which occurred when we were being kicked out of our rental house two summers ago due to foreclosure. So instead of asking for those concert dates off, I've decided that I don't want the casino scheduler to decide if I go or not, and will call in sick on those days if I can't find someone to switch. I know I've earned a little evilness associated with the call-in policy!

At any rate, today is my one day off for the week. Last night/this morning, I didn't go to bed but headed down to the strip to meet up with my old roommate Chris after his shift ended at 3am. We just hung out at Ellis Island playing 5-cent video poker for about 4 hours, catching up and having a few laughs. Oh, we also received probably the worst service by a waitress at the cafe that I've seen in a very very long time! I think our tip was something like 9%, and I really think that was being a little generous in hind site! After the many hours of entertainment, I think I walked out of there about $25 lighter in the wallet, which isn't bad at all. The one bad moment came when we exited the casino at 7:30am and had to deal with that annoying bright orb in the sky on the way home. Damn, I do NOT miss swing shift!

So after what amounted to a 4-hour nap, I'm awake updating the blog and waiting for Danielle to get home. Hopefully she remembered to eat light during the day because we have some plans for All-You-Can-Eat Sushi tonight!!!!!!! Woohooo!!