May 31st, 2018 {SB}

Another Thursday night at the service bar.

While it’s usually my favorite venue in which to ply my trade, the mid-week nights just aren’t very lucative.

To be fair, the casino on the whole is rather like that – it’s just that time of the year – but I’m not yet convinced that it would be doing better during tax refund season, either. I suppose we’ll see.

I arrived, tucked some snacks behind the coffee machine (employee appreciation day for the win), and popped back over to the cage to get my money. I returned in short order and got the bar in as much shape as it really needed to be for the night ahead, and proceeded to… not much, really. A few stray customers here and there, but mostly it was just time to touch up this or that.

After a while, one of our native regulars (whom I refer to as FuckinLenny for reasons too obtuse to go into) showed up, though he wasn’t in a drinking mood. He just wanted to watch the the women’s softball world series on one of the TVs. Anything over basketball, right? So I indulged the man.

Charon came by at one point to talk schedules and I put forth the request (very politely mind you) that weekend service bar shifts are awesome and I’d enjoy a few if the opportunity presents. After a while it was time to head down to the lounge to give Cherry her dinner break. About midway through my time there, I turned to one of our coolers to grab a beer for a guest… which suddenly was not where it was supposed to be. Someone had rearranged one of the trios of beer coolers. I just about came out of my skin. Moving something around that’s been in a certain manner for the past 9 years made me just about wanna leap out of my skin and throttle someone. I restricted myself to a ‘what is this happy horseshit’ comment, but made sure to ask Cherry about it when she came back.

Apparently because the powers that be are too cheap to actually use coolers that don’t break down half the time, someone thought that shifting the beers around would take a load off the compressors or something. I’m not sure – I just know that I’m planning on putting it back the way it was at the next opportunity. I took my own dinner after that, then headed back over to the service bar.

FuckinLenny had buggered off, but there was still softball to watch, so I left that on, but found myself much more interested in the final rounds of the National Spelling Bee. Even with the sound off, it was more interesting than the basketball finals.

One thing that was annoying throughout the night hwoever, was Haley’s running litany of bitching to anyone that would listen about how Cherry treated her. Sounded like a bunch of horseshit to me, to be frank, but Haley’s going to be quitting soon (before she gets fired due to excessive attendance infractions) so at least we’ll be spared it for a while. I know her plan is to quit, then rehire in a month. We’ll see if they let her, I suppose.

Anyway, I eventually went back down to the lounge to spell off Cherry for her last break and chatted with some of the regulars who had shown up. One of them had her boyfriend in tow and was introducing him around. Nice enough guy, plus some neat stories about meeting some wrestler types in one of his previous employment lives.

I eventually headed back to the service bar and Charon showed up maybe 5 minutes later to shut me down and offer me an early shuffle out the door. It’s kind of the routine for the Thursday service bar and I wasn’t inclined to argue the point so I got things shut down. She mentioned to me that she’d tweaked the schedule to make sure that I had more service bar weekend shifts now. Seniority for the win, folks.

On my way to leaving, I realized I’d done a certain thing out of order, so with a couple of minutes to spare before I could punch out yet, I trotted into the bar to let someone know. I found Cherry dressing down Haley (politely, mind you) about not showing up when paged, and that the pit boss was angry, etc. She was firm, but being polite about it. I delivered my message and then buggered off. After clocking out, I happened to run into Haley on my way to the locker room and she again tried to start in about Cherry. I simply refused to bite down on the bait, however. I’ve been at this job way too long to start indulging in that kind of juvenile nonsense. Haley stalked off looking vaguely annoyed that I hadn’t taken her side of things, and with that cue, I got the fuck out of proverbial Dodge.

Closing observations :

The spelling bee is kinda interesting honestly with the sound off. Seriously though, some of those words looked like someone was just blowing a raspberry. Damn, those kids could spell.
Cherry is a really sweet girl, to be honest, but she has zero fucks to give if you’re consistently obnoxious and make her job harder. Haley… doesn’t like to consider the notion that she could be in the wrong. Ever. It’s not surprising to know that those two realities clash a bit.

Next up : -next- Thursday night