Sucker

I'm one of the believers of getting what you earn, and I'd like to think that were I ever to hold a position of power in a company or something like that, that I would hire and promote people based on merit rather than how much I like them. However, judging from the stories that I hear at work, and the things that I see, things definitely don't work like that at my new workplace. I've heard a few stories about people who are sleeping with pit bosses, and who are now a little higher up the ladder than they should be (in order to become a game supervisor, you need to be trained in three games, and you usually get one game per year, but some people have managed to get two games in one year, putting them just that little bit closer to promotion).

The part that annoys me the most is that I've worked with this awesome supervisor who I found out tonight has been there for years, and yet from what I can see, she seems to be getting passed up for promotion. The thing I love most about her is that she doesn't take crap from anyone. The highlight of my shift was seeing her, this short Asian lady (shorter than me, even!) go off at some guys who were being idiots. She's not one of those customer-service oriented supervisors, and since she has been around for so long, she knows all the retards. She tells me about the regulars so that I know what not to do in case I piss them off (like there's this one guy who apparently went crazy at the dealer because the dealer spun the ball before he was ready - and if he hadn't been laying as much money as he was on the table, he'd probably be lumped with the retards, but since he is loaded, he gets special treatment).

To be honest, I really don't know what I want out of work. Since I lucked out and got roulette, which is apparently the fast track to moving up (the usual route is roulette -> baccarat, and having baccarat is supposedly the biggest money maker, so they must treat their dealers well), if I hung around for a bit, I might make some decent money. If getting a job stays as hard as it is, well, that might end up being my only option. The thing is, I'm not a suck-up, and I don't want to be one. Considering how annoyed I get at zero-gamers, dealing baccarat would be like that only ten times worse, so I'd actually prefer to get poker, even if it means I'm going down the non-super fast promotion route (although, only people trained in poker can be poker pit bosses, so that's one advantage to having poker), because I can handle drunk guys much better than I can handle people who don't speak English.

(Although, I had this guy come up with what I'm guessing he thought was a brilliant pick-up line, "Hey Anna, I know you're single, so let's go and get some tea together!" I don't know why that pick-up line would be good since my first thought upon hearing it was, "Well, gee, thanks. So I don't look like I'd ever be able to have a boyfriend..." So maybe drunks aren't so good. =/)

I had Julian-supervisor for a bit today (his name isn't actually Julian, he just looks like Julian. I want so badly to ask him to say "sick life", but I can never bring myself to do it), and I was asking him about someone who trained at the same time with us, but who quit after working there for a couple of weeks. Julian-supervisor was his buddy, so I'm guessing the guy who quit talked to him about his reasons, and I just wanted to know what he said. I had to wait this long because I think he's normally busy with BJ, so I never really get a chance to speak to him. Anyway, when I heard what he said, it didn't sound right. Apparently the reason was because he wasn't able to get time off for exams, but someone from my training group was in the exact same course as he was, and he didn't have any problems, so I don't really know why he wasn't able to get the same treatment, especially since the guy from my group didn't apply until after the other guy had quit.

The thing is, everyone from his training group and my training group all said that the quitter-guy was an ass, and that he exaggerated stuff all the time, lied a lot, and that you should never really believe what he says. He never seemed that way to me, so I usually tried to defend him. Though I'm compelled to believe Julian-supervisor was telling the truth, which means quitter-guy lied to him about his reasons, and so maybe he lied about other stuff, too. It didn't occur to me until I was on my way home that maybe I am a really bad judge of character.

There is a friend of mine who I sometimes play TF2 with, and there was a game that he was playing with a bunch of our friends, and I joined the game. Upon joining, I heard him saying that he wanted me to "go suck on the other team" which I thought was a joke, so I stayed on his team (due to auto-team balance, our friends were split over both teams) and ended up getting MVP, which I thought was funny, because it meant I did more for the team that round than he did. Later I heard that he wasn't joking about wanting me on the other team, which I tried to verify through our other friends, but nobody I asked said they could say for sure, and it was too long ago for me to even remember who else was playing in that game now. Anyway, in the past, people have said bad things about him, and I've sometimes defended him, but lately I've been feeling like maybe that isn't worth my time, considering how he seems to feel about me - which I would like to add that I was willing to be on his team when he was terrible at DotA, although now I would rather not if I can avoid it.

It's strange. Teekay and Lume seemed fine with having me on their arena team, even though I sucked so much and was usually the first one to die. Even though Teekay and I both did OS together, we've only met each other a handful of times, and Lume I only know through WoW. This other friend, I see fairly often (IRL), and usually end up playing games with when I'm not working, and yet he seems less willing to put up with my suckiness. Games have always been for fun for me, but I'm not sure I want to play with people who think I'm bringing them down, and the more I think about it, the more I get the feeling that there are other people who only play with me because I'm their friend and aren't willing to tell me how bad I really am.

I don't know if that makes them better or worse than my other friend, who was at least willing to say that I suck and should work on getting better. I would rather play with people who were happy to play with me than have the feeling that they're only putting up with it because they're my friend. =(

Ghost of Boyfriend Past

I was driving home from se440 dessert today when I was reminded of YN. Back in high school, we promised each other that we'd take over the world together. He went on to do nanotechnology, and I ended up doing software engineering, a good combo for taking over the world, right? We could make little nanobots that target specific people and hold the world to ransom, or something like that. Anyway, ever since then, even though I still have the ambition to take over the world (it's my rightful place as the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, after all), I'm not really interested in doing it with anyone else, despite the fact that YN and I broke up years ago.

It made me wonder, how much hold does a promise you made to someone under different circumstances hold? There was this story in The Pig That Wants to be Eaten about a guy who shoots a candidate for the republic party. When asked why he did it, he says that 10 years ago, they were friends, and his friend once said, "If I ever become a republican, shoot me." So he did. One of the arguments in that book was that the person that made that comment was a different person to the person who was campaigning for the republican party. Just like how when you're a child, you want nothing more than to spend your days watching ABC Kids, but now that you're older, you're far more interested in going out to dinner with friends. The "you" as a child is different to the "you" that you are now, as you have differing (to some degree) personalities, and differing interests.

So the "me" that was dating YN is different to the "me" that I am now, but still, I feel honour bound to uphold the promise I made to him that I'd take over the world with him. We even divided up which parts of the world we'd get, although I think that "taking over the world" with him now would just mean I take over the world and give him the parts that we agreed he would get. I wonder if he would do the same for me if he took over the world?

I think I have a bad habit of dumping someone and never bringing it up again to find out how they're dealing with it. I don't know if that's good or bad. Towards the end, YN and I didn't talk that often, and we had mostly drifted apart (he ended up going to a different university to me), so after we broke up, we never really spoke again. In fact, the last IM I received from him was one of the acai berry spam messages, and the last IM I sent to him was one telling him that he had that acai berry spam virus. The part that I would have liked to resolve was the curiosity that was triggered when Steve (who went to the same primary school as me, and ended up in YN's class at uni) sent me a recorded message from YN saying, "I love Anna!" which he gave to me after we broke up, but I never asked if he was serious. I was kinda freaked out, to be honest. Although, I can't have been sure that it was YN, it sounded like his voice, but for all I know, it could have been some random guy who sounds similar, and for that reason, I never asked YN about it. Or maybe he was talking about another Anna - I mean, as much as I'd like to think I am, I'm not the only Anna in the world, much less than in Melbourne. Also, I would have felt terrible had it really been him and he had really meant it.

Well, one thing I did learn from the YN experience was that I am less inclined to go out with a guy who spends most of his time offline again. So hard to contact someone who is never on some sort of IM program. T_T It's kinda weird though, because I assumed since he liked games like Starcraft, Warcraft III, and Age of Empires 2, I thought he would be geeky and addicted to the Internet like the rest of us, but I guess I was wrong. Although one benefit to his being more of an RL person is that I can be fairly confident that he's not going to read this blog post.