Blogger 365 Day 136 - Mailings

     Some of you may remember a post from a little bit earlier in this project of mine, "When Pranks Go Wrong", and that the first and only stop in my foray that evening was to the Rivers Casino.  Well, along with breaking the gnome, I also managed to spend a few shekels losing money at said casino.  Ever since then apparently the casino has wanted me to come back.  I have gotten emails from them and I now get mailings pretty much once or twice a week about different promotions they are having, or giveaways and contests that or running, or even concerts that are taking place at their venue.  For the most part I just toss them off to the side, like if I would have went on Mother's Day I could have gotten some free cheap jewelry just for showing up.  Thanks but no thanks.

     One of the mailings did intrigue me though, it was a mailing for a contest that happens on Fridays.  Each Friday in May you take a card with two pull tabs on it that was mailed at the beginning of the month. You take the card into guest services (or whatever they call that place, I think the Players Club but I could be mistaken), hand them the card and your casino membership card as well as ID and then have them pull one of the tabs.  You get the prize underneath the tab.  The smallest prize you can get is $25 in free slot play.

     Given I was looking for something to do after work tonight I decided that I would go to the casino and see how this process actually worked.  It didn't seem to make much sense to me to just give out money, otherwise people could just load up their card with the free slot play, stick the card in a machine and then turn around and cash right back out.  And if that is in fact how the process worked, well the number of promotions I have been getting sent with some amount of free slot play would lead me to believe I could have an entirely decent second racket going just getting my promotional credits and then turning around and leaving without actually playing anything. 

     The added bonus of going today was that I had to get a new bus pass for work and I could justify the trip to myself by saying that worst case scenario I will get my bus pass at one of the kiosks in the subway terminal next to the casino, so the trip over would be of some small benefit to me.  I would just stop at an ATM on the way over, maybe grab like $20 bucks and if I lose that at the casino, oh well, I have done worse things with $20 in the past (don't ask).

     Today at work Ed wanted to see if I could handle the paperwork, apparently he wants me to be there when Dee leaves, so today I did most of that stuff in the office, balancing the books for Smithfield and what not.  I also had to sort out 4 different cigarette orders that came in, all of which I had priced out beforehand so we would collect the right amount of money, did a lottery ticket order, took out trash, processed a handful of invoices for our accountant to pick up Monday, ran the deposits to the bank, and showed him where I am saving him money by switching vendors on his e-liquids for e-cigarettes from the vendor he had ordered from previously.  If it sounds like a lot, really for me it is just a typical Friday.  Nonetheless Ed gave me a $50 bonus today just because of the job I did, so maybe I am getting out of the dog house, we will see.

     Now I am thinking I can certainly go to the casino, and not even stop at an ATM on the way, I have money I didn't have when the day started, even if I spend $20 and the promotion sucks, I come home with $30 more than I had when I went to work and I have my bus pass to boot.  So after work I go to the First Avenue subway station and catch a subway for the Allegheny Station.  I managed to finish my book on the short subway ride (it is the top one on the shelf to the right), hop off of the subway, buy my bus pass at the kiosk in the station and walk across the parking lot to the casino.

     Once inside I had to ask where I needed to go to deal with this promotion, having only been there once I had no idea how I was to go about redeeming this offer I had with me but the casino staff were gracious and told me everything I needed to know and in short order I was standing at the proper counter and turned in my ticket, told them which tab I would like pulled and was told I won $35 in free slot play.  Yay me!!  I asked how this is redeemed and was told it is loaded onto my casino card.  A casino card there is just a gold metal flake card, about the size of a credit card, that you can slide into a machine before you play it.  The longer you play, the more points you acquire on it, points that determine your player level.  Certain level players get bonuses throughout the casino.  I am on the lowest level, so I get things like "Free self parking" and 5% off of the Grandview Buffet (one of the places I took the gnome before he died) but the card is not in anyway cash itself, so I was curious how my free slot play was loaded onto it.

     I decide I would go stick my card in a machine and see what happens, so I pick a slot machine, one that says .02 slots, which is a lie unto itself.  The alleged penny and nickel slots do not cost one and 5 cents respectively, rather that is how much each pay line on the machine costs on the smallest possible bet, so my two cent machine I sat down at would have been better called a $1 slot, because there were 50 paylines on it at 2 cents each.  The card reader for my casino cards says I have free slot play on it, so I hit the promotions tab to see how much I have and it says $1.60, or roughly that is what they game me back from the night of "Death of the Gnome".  Seeing $1.60 on the screen made me think that it was less a gnome and more akin to that bad luck idol from when the Brady Bunch went to Hawaii and Greg almost drown in the surfing competition.  Since $1.60 wasn't going to do much anyway, I decided to just stick a $20 in the machine, lose my money and go home.  Except I didn't lose.  Not that I won a great deal either, I got up to $30 and decided I would cash out, put $10 in my pocket and blow the $20 on a different machine.

     I see this really cool Iron Man looking slot machine and think, well, I have blown $20 on worse things (again, don't ask) so I stick my casino card into it and the promotion thing lights up again, except this time I do not have $1.60 in free slot play, I have $61.60 in free slot play.  Not only did I get the $35 I had won, but I got another $25 for some other promotion I wasn't even aware of.  I did see how the promotion worked though, as I was asked how much of my promotional money I wanted to use on the machine, to which I typed in $60 and the machine kept a running balance of how much promotional money I had left, which was separate from any money I won on those free spins.  Which was quite a bit actually, by the time I had spent my promotional cash I was up to $140, which I of course cashed out.  So I sat down at another machine, put $20 in, won $40.  Finally on the last machine I played I did lose some money, but I went into the casino with $60 in my wallet and left with $175, so I can't complain too much.

     So, in the course of one day I managed to get out of the doghouse at work, buy a bus pass, figure out how promotions work at the casino and learn that gnomes are bad luck.  All in all, a pretty productive Friday.