Yer Outta Here!

Well, AGT fans, I nailed the four acts moving into the semifinal round once again making me 12 for 12 in the first 3 quarterfinal rounds.
This next round has the toughest competition including the three acts that didn’t have to perform a second time in the Las Vegas rounds because they were automatically placed into the quarterfinals. They include the human cannonball dude, the dog act and the dude who made the theater into a musical instrument.

One of things that I do like about watching this show at this point of the season is to see the little bios that are produced for each of the acts. Often they talk about what the performer does for a living while they are performing and trying to make their routine self-sustaining.
When the Olympics begin in less than two weeks we will see far too many of these types of bios and I really just want to watch the athletes compete. It just seems as if there are more biographies than actual competitions and they end up annoying me more than making me empathize with the athlete.

But since I am primarily an entertainer I can empathize with the people who try to make it on these shows.

I have been self employed since 1995 with my primary business being sports entertainment and management. Producing sports videos had been the main thrust of what I did and running sporting events. But over the past few years everyone has access to cheap, and good, video equipment and editing software so that business is basically non-existent these days.
This year I was screwed in two major business arrangements (major for me, anyway) that made it impossible to run any of my sporting events.
Since my entertainment career doesn’t cover everything that I need to have covered the beating that I took because of those business deals and the shitty economy made it necessary to take extra work where I could find it.

I teach hypnosis and also do hypnotherapy but it just seems as if everyone I run into has tightened their budgets so even that angle wasn’t working.

I have never shied away from doing anything and because of the described situation I decided to take on two more part-time jobs. I figured that between everything I could make up at least a little bit of what I lost.

The first job that I took was working as a dealer at a casino near where I live. The other was as a softball umpire. Umpiring was more up my alley since I’ve been involved in sports in one way or the other all of my life but the casino position seemed like one that could perhaps have opportunities for advancement and be a good back-up spot in case everything else tanked.

I can tell you that while I sort of liked the technical part of dealing table games dealing with these people was the worst thing I ever had to do in my life. Dealing with drunken degenerate scumbag gamblers is just awful. While there are plenty of decent and fun people who go to casinos to have fun and perhaps win some money from time to time, the casino where I worked was near Philadelphia and it was filled with dirt bags whose asses had to be kissed non stop.

I don’t mind being nice to customers. I’m self employed so every deal I make is with a customer and I’m nice to all of those with whom I do business. But that said I don’t do business with everyone. If I sense that I am going to have a tough time with someone or a situation I can pass on the job. There is no passing by some scumbag who sits at your table and starts calling you names because he just lost his car payment on red 18 at the roulette table.

Table games dealers have to stand there and take that shit from people. Once in a while it’s easy to understand that people are angry because they lost their money and it can be blown off. But occasionally they just get personal and blame all of their misery on the dealer and I’m simply not someone who takes very kindly to that type of talk.

Right away when that started to happen I realized how bizarre my working life was. One day I could do a show in front of a few hundred people and get a standing ovation. Then the next day at 2 o’clock in the morning I could stand at the roulette table and have some drunken piece of shit calling me names.

Last week, some worthless loser finally pushed me over the edge. He was trying to get me to bend the rules at my table and when I told him to stop he went on a rant that attracted the security department’s attention. Now, I’m no diplomat at all and neither were the idiot pit bosses on hand at that point who tried to intervene. While I didn’t say a word to this loser, my facial expressions (such as winking at him, blowing him a kiss and things like that) provoked him to the point where the casino said they no longer needed me.

The next day I felt a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. I truly hated that place. No, I shouldn’t say that I hated that place; I hated their “clients” and how we were supposed to treat them despite how they were treating us.

Unfortunately the casino job kept me away from doing as much umpiring as I could have especially during weeknights. But with that job out of the way I’ve been able to do more umpiring. I’ll even start learning a new sport to referee next week – volleyball. Then it’s back to the drawing board with the sports tournament for next year and hopefully my performance schedule will pick up again.

The umpiring is pretty easy and its fun. There is some running around to do and it’s been hot lately but it pays the same as the casino even if there aren’t as many hours available.

I know what you might be thinking when reading about umpiring; that players yell at the umpires and get up in their faces and spit and kick dirt at you.
Well, that might be true, but at the casino you just had to stand there and take it. As an umpire I can say something back in that situation and usually it’s “Yer Outta Here!”

And now so am I.