It’s been a strange couple of weeks… days of being put on hold and arguing the toss… days filled with jobsworths… days filled with broken promises… And it seems it’s not just me that’s up against this…
Just recently I’m hearing variations on a theme… people telling me that they are having to fight tooth and claw to get what rightfully belongs to them… be it from claiming back over payments made to utility companies or being paid for work that they have completed under contracts… And nobody is really that surprised when they have problems with faceless companies, after all we’re used to hearing that old chestnut – The cheque is in the post… But I’ve been sat with people who’ve been messed around by ‘friends’ and that I find disconcerting… Though I guess in this eAge where there are more modes of communication available than ever before… It’s ironically the easiest it’s ever been to fob people off… Whether that be through email or text or leaving a voice mail…. basically any method that means you get to have your say without having to look that other person in the face and risk seeing the disappointment behind their eyes…
I sat with a friend the other day as she told me how long she’d been having a particular problem and she asked me – Why do people tell you one thing and do another? Why can’t people just be straight with you?
I don’t know… I really do not know…
So… I’ve been rolling it around my head and my thoughts rolled back in time to 1990 and my first day of training as a croupier…
There we were, a group of fresh faces all gathered around an American Roulette table and the pit boss who had been unlucky enough to get the short straw and hence the dubious honor of teaching us the game stood before us…
Listen up people… Here is the very first rule of working in Casinos… if you remember only one thing then remember this…
TRUST NO ONE!
I was a bit taken aback by this as I am by nature a bit of a fluffy bunny and too easily inclined to believe that all people are inherently good… We all stood in silence and looked at this friendly looking chap in a tuxedo… and again he spoke…
TRUST NO ONE!
Repeat… Repeat after me…. TRUST NO ONE!!!
We all exchanged glances and as one we returned his mantra… TRUST NO ONE!
Good he said… And I mean NO ONE!! This side of the table, that side of the table, staff, punters…. from the cleaner to the managing director… TRUST NO ONE! Where money is involved, everybody who walks through that door, you view with suspicion… Everybody who walks through that door has the potential to lie, cheat and steal…
I’d like to say he was wrong but 12 years of observation showed me that the lure of the quick buck is a universal leveler… Temptation casts a net that catches all that stray that way… regardless of colour, class, or creed… I’ve seen many faces make the headlines…
But 12 years of observation taught me a few things… I’m easily bored and always looking for ways to fill my thoughts and over those years as punters sat and watched the wheel and looked to crack the system and find the pattern in random numbers…I watched them… I discovered that people are pretty far removed from random… They have patterns and repeats and cycles… They are predictable in their habits… even those who consider themselves to be unpredictable show a trend if you watch them long enough… And years of standing at card tables suggests to me that there is no such thing as a perfect poker face…. Some get close… But here’s a tip…If you can’t spot the flicker on the face… take a peek under the table and check out the feet… Odds on you’ll spot a riverdance jig…
So… 12 years as a super croupier did pretty much leave me as a cynical old bitch…
So… I decided to consult an old friend… I called on M… I gathered his tatty edges in my hands (if he’d been a casino deck…. he’d have been shredded yonks ago… it’s really bad form to be able to tell which card is which from the backs… 😉 )
So I shuffled away… in a lazy slow hand over shuffle rather than the whizz bang riffle, strip, riffle of an old BJ dealer…
And as I shuffled the words that came to mind where…
A man is only as good as his word…
I cut the deck…
M called back…
A man’s word is his bond…
I laughed… Oh Hanged Man… you are so funny… His bond? I see your ‘bonds’… there are no ties with you… Any bonds that are there are purely imaginary… No?
Expand he said… E..X..P..A..N..D…. let your thoughts grow…
Ok… A man’s word is his bond… yet if the bonds are imaginary… then are the words imaginary… even if you’ve heard them? I mean… to ask what does ‘a man’s word is his bond’ mean… well that seems to be an exercise in futility… you may as well ask…
How long is a piece of string…
Indeed said HM… does any one question carry more weight than another…
Mmmm….
Ok… he said… consider this…
When you’ve been left hanging… that’s the perfect position for the scales to fall from your eyes…
Yeah… I guess it is… suspended… in stasis… all the time in the world to go back and look over those patterns… cycles… piece things all together…
Indeed… and I am unbound… I can choose to wriggle and resist or flip myself onto my feet and walk away at any point… What thoughts do you have about the flip side…
I flipped back into the pit… though this time on the punter’s side and recalled the first rule of gambling…
Never bet more than you can afford to lose…
So… I’m still no clearer as to why people do what people do… though I’m wondering if the world is divided into the punters and the punted…
Card Image – Tarot in the Land of Mystereum (c) Jordan Hoggard 2010
The pure and blessed way 