For those thinking that the recent lack of updates means I've been out doing interesting and exciting things, think again. Most of the past week was spent hanging around the house in case the phone should ring inviting me away to a glamourous ski resort for the winter, because we don't have an answering service on the phone yet. So I watched some anime on my computer, read a bit, and generally achieved pretty much zip.
On Thursday, however, I was booked in to a pair of training courses, in the Responsible Service of Alcohol and the Responsible Conduct of Gambling. You need the RSA to serve booze in pubs or restaurants or whatever in Australia, and you need the RCG to work in a pub or club that has fruit machines (which are called poker machines or pokies here, and are stunningly common and popular).
The course started at nine o'clock, and there was maybe thirty people there for the RSA, a handful of whom were Working Holiday types like myself, the rest being Ozzies. I wasn't expecting the course to be up to much, the way I looked at it was that I was paying for the certificate - but the guy giving the course had at least twenty years' experience in managing pubs and restaurants, kept up with the papers and court cases in the area, had been part of industry programs to promote people not drinking themselves to death in whatever fashion and that kind of thing, knew the course well and had a great anecdotal style of running through everything, so it was interesting and informative and stayed in the thinkin' iron pretty effectively. And it was also pretty obvious that being on the other side of the bar is also a passtime dear to his heart.
He had a story showing how sometimes industry incentives work and sometimes they don't, for reasons you just couldn't possibly predict. They came up with an idea to have money-operated breathalysers in pubs, so people could check if they're over the limit or not and not drive if they are. However, what they actually got used for was a bunch of guys would come in, check the time, drink like maniacs for an hour or whatever, and then all breathalyse themselves to see who's winning. Ingenius. Ahh, our Australian cousins.
There's a bunch of laws regarding drinking and all that, as you can imagine, but some of them are kind of surprising. Like you're not allowed serve somebody who's already intoxicated. And you're not allowed have intoxicated people on your premises. And if you serve an intoxicated person, YOU can be fined, you the barperson. So there was lots of talk about how to handle various situations ("ya've got Big Kev up the back 'o's on 'is twennieth schoonah an' 'e's foine, an' then ya've got young Kylie 'o's on 'er third glass o' champagne an' she's up on the baah gettin' 'er gear off"), drink driving, laws, responsibilities and so forth. There was a few theoretical scenarios to think about and discuss too:
For the first one, the guy reckoned the best idea is to avoid bringing the order until she gets back, and the politely confirming it as if you'd forgotten. Although it seems like a reasonable idea to wait til she's there and bring them over ("here's your beer sir, and here's your VODKA AND ORANGE ma'am") the guy said there's a small but definite risk of her going "you bastard!" and throwing the drink in his face, then smashing the glass on the table and trying to shove it up his nose. Ahh, our Australian cousins. There's a few considerations in the second one, like there's no WAY they've all had the same amount of drink - again, he reckons, avoid it for a while to give them a cooling-off period, and if they still want it then and they're not too far gone then you may as well give it to them - or maybe offer to reserve it for later in the week or something. Third one - although you shouldn't legally have her on your premises, you can't send her outside in that state, there's a clause called Duty of Care where you can make a judgement call to break the letter of the law for the good of the customer. Get her address from her bag, put her in a taxi, if that turns out not to be her address call the cops to stick her in the drunk tank until she's sober enough to know where she lives. Chick on bar should be pretty much manhandled down before she falls and kills herself, and the guy on the pool table - you guys, get your mate off our equipment right now or you're all barred. Interesting stuff.
So there was a short test after all that, mostly stuff like List Five Long-Term Effects of Alcohol Abuse and What Size is a Serving of Fortified Wine with some true-false or multiple choice stuff too. You needed to get 85% or over, and it was a doddle. We collected our certs immediately.
Interesting it had been, but it was pretty intense and I'd been to bed late and risen early and had terrible sleep filled with interesting plot arcs of roleplaying game characters (that often happens when I go to bed right after GMing a game, which was the case), and now it was half three and I was going to have to do it all over again, but with the drier topic of pokies, until half nine. Gruelling.
Addiction to gambling is a pretty alien concept to me. Pokies just aren't very popular in Ireland for starters. Also I seem to have a pretty non-addictive personality - I've given up cigarettes and drinking in the past without giving it a thought, no problems. And gambling is something that I don't really get - sure, I've played a few hands of poker for a few pence, or put down twenty cents on which of two Dungeons & Dragons characters would win, but that's about it, and even then it's something that I'm immediately involved in - pokies seem to be gambling for gambling's sake. I don't care about the Grand National, I ridicule people who play the Lotto, I didn't even get travel insurance for this trip (I bet you 600 Eurobucks that something bad happens to me!). Furthermore at least an addiction to cigarettes or heroin is a chemical thing, it's not just what I would have been inclined to write off a purely a weakness of the personality.
Gambling is a big deal in Australia. 40% of them do it regularly. The whole country shuts down for a while during the Melbourne Cup races. The average Australian gambles away several thousand dollars a year. Up until recently there were 103,408 pokies in New South Wales alone, and the kind of money they pull in is staggering. For this reason, when a study in 1997 revealed the frightening truth about gambling in Australia, a whole bunch of laws controlling it were rushed through, and they're being amended and added to constantly. Plenty to learn.
The lady giving this course was also surprisingly good. She used to work in casinos, uses the word "we" when referring to the folks who make the rules and has obviously had a lot of exposure to people with gambling problems, whether on a professional level or just by being in Australia I'm not sure. This course was indeed drier, with much more in the line of laws to absorb, and of course drinking is a more interesting topic - but the lady had good stories to back up her points, so it too stayed pretty lively. And having real examples of people with gambling problems helped me see what it is that we're being trained to deal with.
Apparently tests done in Canada proved that addicted gamblers get an endorphin rush when they're doing whatever form of gambling it is they're addicted to. Which is highly significant, to me at least, because that means it is a chemical addiction as well. Sure, it's a chemical manufactured in your brain, but a chemical nonetheless. Interestingly, they were getting about 2.5 times the normal amount of endorphines, whereas having sex gives you about 2.1 - so for them it literally is better than sex.
But the stories this woman had were something else. She explained the reason she stopped working in a casino in the Lake Tahoe area of California and got out of the industry for good - there was a bus that'd bring pensioners up to the area for a day out on pension day, and one of her favourite customers was a little old lady who'd bring them up home-made cookies. But this lady would also put hundreds and hundreds of dollars into the machines. And one day the course-giving lady found her eating cat food for lunch in the casino. "It's got real fish!" the customer pointed out. "And food is so expensive..." When queried what happened to her food voucher thingie (I guess it comes with the pension) she said she'd sold it for a couple of dollars to someone who needed it more than she did. And she only eats cat food three days a week, so it's fine. That was when the course-giving lady decided she didn't want to be part of an industry that made people do that to themselves anymore.
She said she'd recently seen a guy at half eight in the morning banging on the door of an establishment with pokies in it, angrily pointing at his watch. When an employee opened the place, the guy pushed past snarling "I have to be in work at nine and I need to win back what I lost last night, the least you could do is open on time". There were newspaper clippings about suicides and the like that she knew the inside track on - this guy knew such-and-such a machine hadn't paid out in two weeks, and reckoned tonight was the night. So he put all his money into it - nothing. Went to an ATM, cleared out his chequing account, put it all in - nothing. Back to the ATM, cleaned out his savings account - nada. Maxed out his credit card for cash, still nothing. Maxed out his other credit card, nothing again. Sold his car to a guy who'd been lusting after it for ages for two grand, on condition he could buy it back anytime within the next twenty-four hours - still nothing. With nothing left he went home, to be greeted by his seven-year old kid saying "Daddy, I need fourty bucks for that field trip we're going on tomorrow." "Shouldn't you be learning to read and write, not running about on stupid trips?" "But you promised!" Kid starts to cry, dad has no money and is angry with himself, life and now the kid, so he hits the kid. Presumably a bunch of times, because the kid dies of a concussion and has broken ribs.
Another one was a woman whose husband committed suicide, it turned out to be over a gambling problem. She found that there was no money in the account where they'd put their savings, and when enquiring about his life insurance it transpired he'd cancelled it. And also house insurance, car insurance, health insurance for the kids, basically everything he could without her noticing. She couldn't even pay for the funeral. She figured she could get a bit of money by selling his expensive golf clubs, which she knew he still had because he'd bring them out every so often - but when she took the sock things off they turned out to be broom handles, he'd sold them off long ago himself.
Worst of all was a story she had about her wedding ring. Worth about $37,000 or so, a big honkin' diamond with carats and whatever and other diamonds that had been put in to represent personal things, and her husband's mother had taken it off her own finger as she was dying, put it into this lady's hand and pressed her fingers closed over it, and then died. So she was teaching a class in a school or university or something, and took the ring off and put it in her briefcase. And when she got home it wasn't there, it'd obviously been nicked by somebody in her class. The school management wouldn't let her get the police in (apparently the cops need their permission) because it'd give a bad reputation, so she had to sit there for another three months with the class, knowing it was one of them but not which one. The insurance company wouldn't pay up because it wasn't on her finger at the time, and she spent about six months going through every pawn shop and jeweller's in the city. Then the cops suggested she check out the area near the gambling part of town where fences hang out. And so after pestering this one guy there for a week or so, he eventually said you'll never see it again, I cut it up an hour after I got it, I gave that silly Nepalese bitch 1200 for it but she was so desperate she would have taken 400.
So that told her who the perpetrator had been. A girl in her class who had actually stayed with her for two weeks, because she was helping the kid get out of her abusive cousin's apartment - he took her money and tried to rape her, and so forth. And of course then it transpired that none of that was true at all, the cousin was a fine guy, but the chick had a major gambling problem. This story shocked the entire class into absolute stunned silence, I've never seen the like of it.
So anyway, after all that there was a similar test to before. And despite having been cramming in info for about thirteen hours, years and years since having last done an exam, and general disinclination toward academic ability, I scored a perfect fifty out of fifty. Yay me!
When I made it home from all that, it was time for my first responsibly served drink, the first of many - a vodka martini shaken in a madras sauce jar. Worth waiting for.
Yesterday brought more sitting about, and then some drinking and chatting for long into the night. And today the washing machine arrived! I think we need some kind of a cap for the to-be-unused hot water inlet before we can make it go though - hope we get that quickly because I'm down to my last set of clean underwear and really don't want to handwash stuff in the bath again.