...Like A Rented Mule

Happy Friday, everyone. I hope you all have a fun day at work before your weekend buffoonery gets underway.

Me? I'm beat. I'm feeling like I was run over by a truck. A very large, angry truck.

It's still tough for me to sleep at night, as my body still wants to believe that I'm still working swing shift. So no matter how tired I am, between midnight and four am or so, I'm always wide awake. And that truly sucks when I have to either get up around 6 am, or already have to be at work by 6 am.

Having to be at work at 6 am is extremely shiatty. Unless there's a drunken carryover no-limit game from the night before (which is chock full of monetary awesomeness!), I'm sitting on my ass doing absolutely nothing but yawning and watching infomercials for the first two hours of my day. And, that usually means I get punted out of there by 11 am when the tournament crew shows up. So about three times out of every five, when I have to be in at 6:00 am, it's a crappy shift.

Wednesday was one of those days--I had no game until almost 8:00 am, and then I got booted at 11:30 because we only had one cash game and one tournament table left by then, with four dealers on hand. It was a miserable day for me, and I was kind of pissy when I left. Luckily, I'd had no sleep the night before, so as soon as I got home, I took a shower and went straight to bed, sleeping until around 9 that night. Of course I was up all night watching TV or surfing the net, and I finally tried to go to sleep around 4:00 am yesterday, but that never happened.

My alarm was set for 6:30, and I was wide awake when it went off, so I turned on the light and shuffled off to the bathroom. While taking my shower, I started yawning and thinking that it was gonna be a long tiring day, and I was right.

Even though I was ready to go to sleep, by the time I got to work at eight, there was a full game going. Luckily some backward-hat wearing youngsters had injected some life into the usual morning old-farts limpfest, so we were pushing good-sized pots around the table. By the time the tournament started at 11, I'd opened another cash game, and after my tournament 'down' ended at 12:30, they'd sent one of the full-timers home and I opened a no-limit game, too.

I always love a good-no limit game--they're usually pretty lucrative and even if we open it short-handed, it fills up immediately. So I spent the balance of the afternoon pushing three tables, instead of the usual half-hour on/half-hour off that I normally do early in the morning. And they told me that not only would I be working the entire shift, but if more players showed up, there was a chance I'd be working some OT. I was certainly ok with that--I'd love to work some extra hours. I was fully prepared to chain myself to that poker table for the balance of the evening.

But, as busy as I was, I managed to get out of there after my normal eight-hour shift was completed. And I had a *huge* day, too, which was very nice--I quadrupled my take-home from the day before, so I was pretty happy. It's amazing what a two-hour difference in my start time makes...

But man, I tell ya what, when I finally hit the parking garage, I was completely wiped out. The combination of no sleep and a long work day had sucked the life right out of me. I had a long shopping list and every intention of hitting the grocery store, but I was so tired that I drove straight home, took a cool shower, and then immediately fell asleep.

I didn't have dinner or do anything else, and I crashed until about a half-hour ago. It's just after midnight right now, and I'm still pretty tired. So I'll putter around for another hour or so, trying to answer all of the mail, but I'm gonna get some more sleep before I go to work this morning.

After today, I'm just on call all weekend, but it's looking like I may pick up a shift or two--there are a couple of full-timers going on vacation, some of our floor supes have to go over and help with the Alliante recruiting (which makes our dual-rate dealers have to pick up the floor shifts, opening up dealing shifts for Yours Truly), and the bad-beat jackpot is inching ever closer to that magical $200,000 level which brings in the players at all hours of the day and night. I know that I picked up another day on the schedule for next week already, but I'm hoping to score another weekend shift, too.

Funny, back when I was working in the pit, I could care less if I worked or not--I'd jump on the extra time off like Rosie O'Donnell on a pint of Ben & Jerry's. But now that I'm keeping my own tokes and doing a job I really enjoy, damn, they can work my ass ten hours a day for seven days a week and I wouldn't complain. Much.

Anyhow, that's what's going on here. I've got another full day of work ahead of me, three days of maybes, and then four more scattered around after that.

It's nice to be busy.

I'll post more this weekend. Y'all have a good one!

Mikey