The Lost Weekend (Part I)

So here’s fun :

Saturday night rolls around. I don the regulation Zebra suit, holster the cell phone, grab the wallet and keys and my traditional “implements of de-struction” as Arlo would put it, and get into my car. I put the keys in the ignition and my cell phone rings.

I raise an eyebrow slightly.  Odd time for a call.  I slip the phone out of my handy pants pocket and look at the caller idea. It’s the casino.

Well -that’s- not a good sign.  I’m a good 15 minutes ahead of schedule. No way they can be calling me to ask where the dickens I’ve wandered off to. I’m not needed for the evening? Well it would suck for the money lost, but I wouldn’t fuss I suppose. With a Blackadderish due sense of exhaustion and dread I thumb the call into a connected state and say hallo.

The woman on the other end, a supervisor I rather like speaks to me for a while. I nod. My eyes widen slightly. The phrase “Are you fucking kidding me?!” slips out of my mouth, in fairly calm tones all considered. We have a conversation. She apologizes repeatedly and promises to look into the matter. I assure her she’s got no heat with me, but that I am regardless hot about the situation.  We close the conversation amicably.

I remove myself from the car and go back into the house, inform all and sundry of the foolishness afoot, forcefully divest myself of the Zebra suit, and proceed to enjoy my evening. As the night progresses, I cannot help but notice that not a single soul puts dollars and/or quarters onto my desk.

Oh.

I guess the contents of the phone call might be important.  A quick bit of background for you :

At the casino where I am currently a part-time (yet still the most senior) bartender, we need to have two pieces of licensing, if you will, valid and active in order to work.  The first of these is our gaming license. It hangs around our necks. The expiration date is clearly visible. It’s easy to keep track of. The other is our TIPS certification. This is basically a class we take and a test we pass that illustrates that we have sufficient training to responsibly dispense and not imbibe our alcoholic products. The card for -this- is kept in a hidden and locked secret place and never sees the light of day and thusly, is ridiculously difficult to keep track of.

The supervisor who called me (Whom I think I’ll refer to as Granny NoBS – ‘cuz she’s a grandmother, but takes absolutely no bull from anyone god bless her), informed me that when she arrived at work slightly early, she discovered an e-mail regarding the status of my TIPS certification. Not something helpful, like “Hey, Hellrazor’s cert is going to run out soon, you might wanna send him to this class we’re having just this past week, ‘cuz it’d be handy and helpful and all that”. No.  It was instead “Hey, Hellrazor’s certification is expired and he can’t work, and furthermore, the next class isn’t until the middle of March so fuck that loser, maybe he’ll finally quit now.”  I’m paraphrasing, obviously.

So while the crux of her call was to tell me that and to inform me that I’m not allowed to come earn money, the tone of her voice was amusingly both highly apologetic and furious at the people who put her in this position, ‘cuz we are -not- drowning in bar staff these days.

So this leaves me up a certain creek without a certain implement, as it was once said.

Best case – someone pulls their head out of their backside, holds a spontaneous class early, and lets me go to work while waiting for the pass/fail to come back.  But this is the casino we’re talking about, so what’s more likely is – I can’t take the class until the middle of the month, the wife has to ditch a day of work to accomodate it because the test folk probably won’t be amused by my wheelchair-bound son riding shotgun for the experience, and then maybe a week or two later the results will come back because these bozos do not ever believe in paying extra cash to rush one of their valued staff back into service because even though they’re in a building that basically applies suction to a wallet that would make a sex worker blush, that switch does not ever work in reverse.  In short – for the bulk of the month of March, it’s essentially sandy vaseline time.  I’m going to get shafted out of three to four weeks worth’ of work in all likelyhood, and all the tips that go with it, right at the peak ripeness time for tax return season. Fuck me. Fuck. Me.

So that’s that. I’m fairly hot about the situation, but playing damage control on a budget that suddenly hit an iceberg the size of the titanic is keeping me occupied for the moment.

“But Hellrazor”, I hear you cry, “Where the dickens have you been for the last six goddamned years?!”

Well, for starters, there was that whole site shut down thing, but I got busy, essentially.

Here’s what’s really funny – the wife informed me that OD was back up and kicking and I was thinking I should try to see if either of my diaries was still in a salvagable state.  I couldn’t for the life of me remember the username I’d used for this one.  So the night that this all happened, one of the things I did was head to OD’s site and typed in old e-mails until one of them went ‘ding!’ and recieved a message. I jumped through the hoops and got the stuff reinstated. A day later I realized it was -this- one.  I just about laughed my head off, and truthfully, I was pleased as well.

So I’m going to be writing here again, documenting my bar shifts as it was before, or for a while, my lack of bar shifts, on the appropriate days.  I’ve gone through all the old entries and boxed them up into an appropriately titled chapter, so if you find yourself so moved, feel free. They’re a fun read. I skimmed more than a few during the process.

For now, I’ve got things to do. Adios, my friends.

 

Closing observations :

• “I try to laugh about it now, but isn’t it funny how everything works out. I guess the joke’s on me.” – Free shot of water to the first one who knows that one.
• Dogs bark at the most ridiculous nonsense. I know that’s not bar related, but I haven’t worked in a bar for a few days. And I -have- had a guest bring a support pocket-dog through the bar a couple of times, so hey. Kinda fits.

 

Next up : Saturday/Sunday to come, as the Lost Weekend continues