This is Vegas, baby!

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I went to my old haunts tonight with my lovely 18 year old daughter and her beau for my birthday dinner. She mentioned she was low on money and I was dead broke so I decided to go to my old casino where I worked closely with the floormen and pit bosses as a lowly pit clerk.

I was a bit anxious at exposing myself and mooching for dinner and wondered if it would take me an embarrassingly long time. But at my first stop in pit 10 I saw Nancy, the dual floorman and pit boss. She had always been excellent in her customer service to me as a boss and the day she discovered I got hired to deal at the Imperial Princess she confronted me and told me to see her after I dealt for a year and she would get me a job at one of a couple of Strip casinos (my guess is the tips at them average around $60k/yr) which honored me to no end.

Well, I told her it was my birthday and she asked me if I was hungry and then wrote a comp for the 3 of us and 2 rounds of drinks. What a fine boss!



So, we went to the casino coffee shop, which, folks, is quite a thing at a posh Strip casino, one of the largest in Las Vegas. Well, you can see from the pictures that it was a great meal. Steak and lobster (filet, that is), Rib Eye steak, chicken fajitas and 3, count em, 3 appetizers. The waiter kept trying to give us more and more food, all for a better tip, of course. Huge Scampi, chicken wings and the best Brushceta I've had in years.... The check was over $200. This joint knows how to treat you nice.

My daughter kept expressing guilt over the extravagance, and asked me how I knew the bosses here and all. I just explained to her that this how Vegas worked. We take care of each other.

I told her it's like we are building covens of followers whom we help along the way in the casino industry. I told her about Milo (true name since this is post-humous), the man I never met but who benefited my family economically for 20 years. Mom would always talk about how Milo did this for her and did that. As he prospered and went from a better casino to another better casino he always took my mom with him. And she made more and more money. One day she told us that Milo died. Our juice who had prospered our family for 2 decades was gone.

But by then she had widened her juice network and eventually landed jobs at the top casinos in town, earning almost six figures. Yes, folks, I said six figures. In fact, it was a six-figure amount she showed me that fateful day last summer when she took me out for lunch to compare our incomes and illustrate my need to jump on the Vegas money train.



Now, she has juice waiting for me when my dealing skills get to par, especially my roulette. But, she wisely suggested to take the pit clerk job at the famous casino I mentioned where I have generated my own juice.

You see, folks, if you have a commitment to excellent customer service and you work hard at it, which wasn't hard for me cuz I got joy out of giving it, and you learn the basic dealing skills casino bosses are going to go way out of their way to further your career.

So, Johnny Lee, the young chinese pit boss who earned my favor by deliberately learning the names of all his lowly pit clerks and just establishing a warm human connection with everybody, told me on my last day there that he would juice me in as a dealer. I was floored. I thought he was joking but he made it clear that he was dead serious.

Sometimes it floors me to think how easy it is to get a job earning $70,000 a year at merely 40 hours a week. It feels surreal, folks, like I'm cheating somehow.

In many circles such talk would be quickly labeled pipe dreams and boyish fantasy. "You think you're just gonna waltz in there and in a year be earning over $60 grand a year as a dealer? HA!”

But, my mom is doing it, my step-dad did it, and I see hundreds of dealers doing it every day here! I mean, you gotta be stupid to shun the job opportunities in Vegas! If you like people and can add to 21, are willing to give excellent customer service and give up holidays, it's a cinch.