Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Some Turmoil at the Office

On Monday I was told by my new supervisor that my hours would soon be changed to 9pm-5am for Monday, Thursday, and Friday. On Saturday and Sunday the want me to work noon-8pm. I had been pretty happy to have a somewhat normal routine working 1pm-9pm, so I'm not happy about this potential switch. Also, I'm going to make them change my Saturday schedule. Currently, they seem to expect me to work until 5am and then come back again at noon.

All the props in the upper section at the Bike had a meeting last week. The guy who had been the interim supervisor is being replaced by Mo, who had been the supervisor for the "hosts," who are essentially just props who play the bigger NL games. This is unfortunate - I thought the interim supervisor did a great job.

It seems that most new hires start in my position as a 20-40 open prop. However, most people find this job too difficult and either quit or switch jobs within a few months. A lot of them move to the middle section where the swings are much smaller, but others become "silent" props, who just play one game all day (eg 20-40 limit holdem) and cannot be moved by the floor people. The "open" props make less than 10% more than these "silent" props after taxes, so the casino has trouble keeping people in the open prop position. Their solution is to lower the silent props' salaries by 20% and offer to let them switch to being open props. Meanwhile, it was determined that there were not enough props working overnight, so we were warned at the meeting that some people's schedules would be changing. Considering that all the silent props were already given the bad news of a pay cut, I figured there was a good chance I would be among those moved to the graveyard shift. So, I wasn't too surprised by the news that they were, indeed, changing my schedule.

Mo, my new supervisor, tells me that I might be able to switch my schedule back if they hire some new props for the graveyard shift. Short of that, he says he would rotate in the other props in a few months if I still wanted to switch back to a day-shift. My current plan is to get my weekend schedule changed to something more reasonable, and then at least try my new schedule for a while (assuming they actually go through with all these proposed changes, which seems likely). I've heard the games overnight are pretty good, so maybe it will be okay. The main problem is I don't know when I'll be sleeping. I'll need to put up some darker curtains, I guess.

2 comments:

LW said...

Holy crap, your new schedule sounds kind of brutal. I know working only night shifts is supposed to be bad for your health, but trying to operate on a night schedule and a day schedule in the same week somehow sounds worse to me.

Also, I was a little confused: In the second to last sentence of the third paragraph, you said that "the open props were already given the bad news of a pay cut," and I was wondering if you meant the silent props. If you also got a pay cut, that just sucks.

Anyway, good luck and thanks to you and Brigid for looking after Ben!

Keith said...

You're right, I meant the silent props get a pay cut. I think I might only have to do this a couple weeks before some new props show up.