My First Working Experience
My sister works for Genting Entertainment as a facilitator. She said that her job mostly is training newbie workers. Shouldn’t they call her trainer? Perhaps Genting needed a better term for trainer. During a trip back from Genting sometime back in September 2006, she said that I’d better go find a job during the year end holidays. Her main objective is to enable me to understand the value of money and the working life. At first I said no, but then I realized that perhaps this could be fun, considering the pay was quite high. I was offered a job as a croupier. Well, croupier is another term for casino dealer, See! They figured out a better term to make the word sound more superior.

The interview was arranged by my sister because I missed the day I was supposed to be interviewed. The interview went rather well except for the fact that my hands were sweaty. Apparently, they do not allow people with sweaty hands to work as croupiers. The interviewer told me that she’ll let me go through the training but if I’m kicked out for sweaty hands, then it’s bye-bye for me. The day I reported in for work was hectic. I was shocked by the amount of people who applied for a part time job at Genting. Most of them were sixteen, so mingling with them should be easy.

My two-week training was tough but exciting. Surprisingly, there is so much to learn about casino games and how to work with them. I was assigned to learn 4 casino games. My primary table game was Roulette and the other three were Tai Sai, French Boule and Mini Dice. These three were easy to learn and execute but the Roulette was pain in the neck. There were so many things to remember, especially the protocols. We were told to memorize certain timetables so that we would pay the right amount to the winners. I met a lot people at Genting, both my sister’s colleagues and my training mates. As always, there were different kinds of people there: the ones who laughed, serious, socially active and so on. After much consideration, I chose to hang out with those who always laughed and were extremely funny. The things we did were silly and childish. We often sat on the Skyway at night as our hanging out spot. Just by flashing our IDs, we get ourselves a free Skyway ride. On the last day of our training, we were given a tour to our future working place. Yup, it’s the casino. Most of the trainees were looking forward to that day since the beginning of the training. We were astonished by the sophisticated design of the casino. There were chandeliers, CCTVs everywhere and I MEAN EVERYWHERE! I bet you can’t even pick your nose without getting caught on camera. After that, we were told to choose a group on our own so that we can start working the next day. Each group has its own reputation. What we heard was that Group A was decent but dead serious, Group B was known to have hot-tempered supervisors, Group C was known to have handsome guys and pretty girls but were inaccessible due to the excessive trainees who chose the Group C, while Group D was of the crazy, party freaks. I chose Group A because my newly befriended friends were there.

At first, my working days as a croupier were challenging but later it became part of my everyday life at Genting. Although my working hours are 8 hours, I only work for approximately 6 hours a day. Well, because I’m a Roulette dealer, I usually spend the time standing while working. Seem pretty unfair if I were standing 8 direct hours. For every 1 hour and 20 minutes, I was given a 20 minutes rest. Do the math and you’ll know how fortunate I was.

At the end of the month, my total income was about one thousand five hundred including the training salary. It was indeed an exciting first working experience for me.
 

                                                                 Edwin Chen