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!!