One Armed...

I haven’t exactly been a neglectful blogger as of late, but more of a busy one. In the last week every time it came down to choosing between sleep or any other activity, sleep won (except when the bike won). This was mostly because I worked 76 hours last week. Only eight of that was overtime, the rest was the start of my second job. As they say, I’ve been ‘busier than a one armed paper hanger’ but thankfully not actually hanging wallpaper.

My first few days have been typical really. I was lost, confused, and nervous. With this job it is more important that I know the ins and outs very well as when I am cleared, I will be cleared as a single provider. Which means that most times I’ll be acting as the only ALS provider on any given scene. This is enough to make me nervous as I will not have anyone else’s opinion to fall back on. Let alone the fact that I am very unfamiliar with the area, and don’t know any of the ambulance crews yet.
Overall, I am very excited about it. All of my coworkers seem like really cool people and have been very nice to me. It seems like a very laid back place, and yet very aggressive in terms of patient care, which is great.

On Halloween, I went trick or treating with the niece and nephews. I think that the whole concept of getting free stuff from strangers for doing nothing more than uttering three words, is completely mind blowing to them. As it should be.

On Saturday I learned how not to win at slots. Now, of course that wasn’t my initial goal. We tried lots of things to win. First we talked nice to them. “Big money, big money! Oh yeah!” “What a great machine you are, don’t you want to give us some money?!”
Well, when that didn’t work (and asking a penny slot machine for ‘big money’ is a little silly anyway) we started to be not so nice. “What is wrong with you? Why don’t you give us some money! You’re a sorry excuse for a slot machine!”
In conclusion, neither morale boosting nor berating won us much. It was still good fun, and we got to do some good people watching. First of all, I couldn’t believe the number of a. slots, and b. people playing them. Hundreds! What I didn't know was that slots go from betting one cent to five dollars, so it can add up quickly. What a racket! From just the four of us, the state probably made enough money to pave a few feet of highway or buy a few new magazine subscriptions for the local library.
You could tell that some people there were hard core into the slots. Dangerously so. We passed by several people who commanded at least two machines in a row and were wildly pressing the ‘repeat bet’ button.
Oh yeah, most of the slots are straight video, you don’t even have to pull the arm of the one armed bandit. I tried to stick to the traditional slots as I received great satisfaction from pulling the arm. Also, they all operate on vouchers. When you win, there is no great sight of money pouring from the machine. It adds it all up for you on the screen and then you can print out the voucher to get your money. This was weird and a little disappointing to me. I have made it my new goal to gamble with real coins somewhere and then fill the center console of my car with hundreds of quarters.

Other than that, I've been kayaking, rode the bike in the rain, beat Halo 3, and baked dessert.