Workplace 24 - Gamboling Gamblers

If you’ve never visited the Casino, it is a beautiful old building, with sandstone columns outside and gorgeous cornices and ornate touches inside. There are fantastic big ballrooms, and elaborately decorated hidden niches all over the building. All of which are filled with pokies. Or gaming tables. Or bars. Not so much a restoring of history but a pillaging. However, this is Brisbane and I’m sure if it wasn’t a casino it would be a carpark. But I am off-track.

I worked in one of the restaurants at the Casino for two months. There are three restaurants on the premises, one is a buffet, one is an expensive fine dining option and one is middle of the range, standard dinner fare. I worked at the final option, Café 21. The Casino is like nowhere I had worked prior. Or since really. They have hundreds of staff, your uniform is dry cleaned and you pick them up or drop them off prior to each shift. Massive underground staff locker rooms allow you to store your things and shower, while the staff eatery has a 24hr buffet. Staff have 2 meals per shift free of charge and the fare differs every day. The pay was a few dollars an hour better than any other hospitality place which, coupled with the free food and washing, made it pretty much a dream job. The catch was that everything is open round the clock and you can be rostered to start at any time. There are also no end times on the roster, just start times so you finish whenever they say. Makes for crazy sleeping and social habits.

The people who work there are the most fantastic thing about this job, I have never worked with such crazy people. The restaurant had a staff of between a dozen to 30 people on at any one time, round the clock and of all these people, the mix of guys and girls was pretty even but there were only 2 straight guys. I know there are gay guys out there that aren’t all about drama but these were not them. Every shift someone was losing it at someone else for something that happened with their boyfriend on the weekend. There were a couple of guys that were only gay when they were drunk, and one who was straight when he was drunk. The staff hung out together on times off and regularly came into the restaurant to eat when they weren't working so there was constantly drama somewhere. Keeping up with the social happenings at this place was insane. I suspect that this lifestyle doesn’t create/attract the most well adjusted people.

The worst thing about this job was the people that came into the restaurant. All of the customers were people who had finally left the gambling outside because their body had finally conviced them it NEEDED FOOD. So they wanted food immediately so that they could get back to their pokie/gaming table. They also hated wasting their money on food instead of gambling so resented the cost of everything.

One of the items on the menu was a $99 seafood platter. It was three tiers of seafood and salad and it was massive. I couldn't actually lift it and it would feed 2 -4 people depending. There was a whole pineapple on it for goodness sakes. One night I was carrying the (thankfully) empty stand back to the kitchen and dropped it. Fruit and seafood discards went everywhere, it was awful. Fortunately a table of very drunk guys was right next to it and they immediately scrambled around on their hands and knees to pick it up for me. Pretty hilarious.

So working there was great in terms of cash flow, and suddenly being a part of a giant dysfunctional family type community but made doing pretty much anything except work and sleep near impossible.

This was a great job, for a short time. I feel that it would become completely exhausting after a while but the novelty was great. Until you realise that most of what you’re eating everyday is deep fried and you haven’t slept properly in weeks, it’s pretty awesome. If you’re into that lifestyle, it will work fantastically for you, but if you’d like order and structure to your life, we’ll need to keep looking.