Down With O.T.B.

I'm writing this now before I forget to completely. I'm making it a tradition to review my previous employment on the blog in order to look back and put it into perspective. For those of you that were unaware, this summer I worked as a mutuel teller, employed by the Tucson Greyhound Park, at an Off-Track Betting site (OTB). Most of the OTBs are in bars, mine was Famous Sam's, but they do have them in bowling alleys too. This was a departure in many ways from my other jobs in that I was unsupervised and was not required to be pleasant to customers at all. I still was, to the best of my ability, but there were no smarmy comments from the boss telling us to smile more. When taken in the greater context of things, this job was very unfulfilling spiritually but when you take it at face value it was a really sweet gig. $7.30 an hour plus tips (ranging anywhere from $5 to $75 a day, but averaging about $20) made this the highest paying job I ever had, the slow morning shift and unsupervised work meant that I was essentially paid and tipped to read novels all day. Incredibly low stress and easy going, the job had some definite appeals and I wish I had discovered it in college, so I could have been paid to do homework.
Now, naturally, all jobs have a down side and depending on one's viewpoint, this one had some pretty severe ones. First off, you get to see the seedy side of humanity, angry people gambling all their money away, their souls poisoned by greed. I've never met such grouchy people in all my life; people yelling at me for giving them a losing ticket even if those were the numbers they wanted, people getting angry when they win but can't get the money right away, people who accuse me of trying to cheat them when they buy a racing form they later realize they don't want and I don't refund their marked up books. One guy, a crackhead (so I excuse his poor manners) will gamble his money to fund his habit, though lord knows where he gets the money in the first place. Another guy, who reminds me of Gil from the Simpsons inhis voice and demenor— he's always so convinced he's going to win every time and he always has to spend $20 every time he comes up to the teller and he loses almost every single time. In addition to the majority of the customers being ugly on the inside, they are also among the most physically repulsive people I've met as well. They're mostly old men who spend their days betting on horses and dogs, perhaps because they frighten small children when seen in daylight.
The other thing that people complain about is the fact that, as an employee of a dog track, I am supporting cruelty to animals. I counter this by pointing out that every industry has corruption. Period. So while some kennels at the dog track might be guilty of animal abuse, it doesn't necessarily reflect on the moral character of the entire organization. Secondly, by that logic someone working for a defense contracter is complicit in death and carnage and someone who works at a golf course or resort supports wasting water.
Whatever the larger scope of the job might have been, I found working as a bookie to be a decently paying, very low stress job that gave me the opportunity to catch up on my reading list. I would never want to work there forever, but the allure of being paid to read all day is compelling enough for some, apparently to spend decades there.