Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Imperfection

I'm "flooring" more these days than I am dealing. In fact, every day this week and next, I am scheduled to work up front. That is, if I can manage to stop screwing up.

My job is mostly as a cashier/brush. A brush is mainly in charge of maintaining waiting lists and seating players into poker games. A cashier exchanges chips for currency and is responsible for keeping the bank balanced. I do both of these jobs simultaneously. Throughout an 8 hour shift, I will conduct hundreds of transactions. It is imperative that I follow a strict procedure when counting out chips and currency, selling tournament tickets, making change, or exchanging money with the other cashier window. Doing so allows surveillance to accurately record all transactions. It can be overwhelming at times. At the end of each shift, the incoming cashier will count all chips and currency in the presence of the outgoing cashier. The total needs to be the same as it was at the beginning of the shift. If its not, then surveillance will have to review tape from the entire shift to find out where the mistake occurred. These shortages and/or overages are referred to as "variance". A cashier is permitted variance within certain amounts and within certain periods of time. If one exceeds the allowable parameters, then Houston, we have a problem.

I have worked a total of 4 shifts. On my first day, my window came up perfect. Dead on. Yay. I love it when a plan comes together. On my second day, I was $100 short. Fuck. Surveillance was alerted and after reviewing every single transaction, found the instance where I made the error. Just before the shift change, I gave a player $100 extra in exchange for his chips. Garrrrgh. On my third day, my window came up perfect. Woohoo! And then today, we found the guy that I gave the extra $100 to. We showed him the surveillance pictures and he gladly gave back the $100! YAY! No write-up. I was feeling pretty good about it.

That feeling quickly went away when my window came up $200 short tonight. FUCK! Where did I screw up this time? I was SO CAREFUL. I counted and recounted everything. I was hyper diligent. How could this happen.... AGAIN? For the second time in a week, surveillance is combing through 8 hours of video looking for where I messed up. Hopefully they will find it. But even if they do, I am starting to wonder if I am capable of doing this job.

I'm embarrassed. I have had many jobs over the years. No matter what they have been, I have always taken pride in doing them well. I feel I am doing a good job in this role, except for the part where I can't fucking count. GAH! This is really bothering me. I'm going through everything in my head trying to figure out where I might have boned the thing up. I'm coming up blank. Logic suggests that I probably gave chips to a customer without collecting the money. This would make sense considering $200 is a very common buy-in and the sort of transaction that would happen very quickly.

Let's hope I get it right tomorrow. I pretty much have to.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Nice post Greg. In my experience, you have to balance being fast as well (and more impiortantly) as being accurate. Having known you for a little while and seeing how meticulously you ran the PCC, It is not your counting skills that are failing you. When dealing with money in a situation, attention to detail is very important more so than speed. So SLOW DOWN when you are doing the job. I would rather be Slower but more accurate than fast with errors. I have confidence that you will figure it out. Hang in there.

Love reading about your adventures over there.

Jay

Rabbit said...

Thanks Jay.

Update: Surveillance confirms that sold chips to a customer without collecting the cash. We know who he is. I have a week to spot him and get it back.

Oh and my window came up perfectly yesterday.