Friday Afternoon Update

Hey everybody!

Sorry for the dearth of postings, but there has been nothing really newsworthy happening in the past couple of days. My days off have been dull--I didn't leave the house except to go grocery shopping, and my workweek started up again last night. There was nothing interesting going on in the casino, either.

I'm glad that the NFL season is finally underway, but starting on a Thursday is sort of anti-climactic, since we have to wait three days for the rest of the teams to play. I'm just glad that this game wasn't on Sunday, because I totally would've bet on the Saints to cover. Talk about dodging a bullet!

In the meantime, I want to thank reader Garry, from Ocanada, for his generous package I received from Amazon yesterday. It seems that he was browsing my wishlist and sent along a couple of cruising/sailing videos that I had been interested in. Thank you very much! Unfortunately, due to my sleep schedule and the fact that this a a sports-junkie weekend, I won't be able to watch them until Tuesday at the earliest. Or I may just save them and take them on the plane with me next weekend and watch them on my laptop during the flight.

Other than that, life is extremely boring at the moment. I could bitch about work, but they *seem* to have made a couple of positive changes in the past couple of days that should put an extra buck or two in my pocket, but we'll see. And as much as it sucks for Rob, who is on the Extra Board, they've cut back the part-timers hours significantly next week. I don't know if that's really necessary on his shift, but on my shift, I *know* we have waaaaay too many dealers working after midnight, so if there are fewer part-timers lurking about, it's better for the rest of us. But it's just been slow all over.

I think I'm about the only dealer in all of Las Vegas who hasn't applied at the new Palazzo casino they're adding on to the Venetian. It seems like a nice gig, but they had about 5000 people apply for 600 dealer jobs. And the rejection letters started arriving this week--a couple of my good friends, who are *excellent* dealers, got the bad news already, and I have a couple of other friends who still have auditions scheduled. Me? I dunno, it seems like a good gig, but I just knew that it would be a stampede of people trying to get over there. They all seem to think it's gonna be a $300 per day job, but those players have to come from somewhere. I'm guessing that the Venetian will be competing against itself for a majority of the action. I don't pretend to know, but as slow as things are right now, it's hard to imagine another huge new casino opening up that isn't going to scavenge players.

Hopefully things will pick up soon. Hell, maybe it's just my casino that's slow. If that's the case, it might be time to seek greener pastures.

Mikey