Why did I move to Las Vegas?
Honestly? Because I didn't want to NOT do it. If that makes sense. I have tried very hard to cultivate an image of an impulsive, carpe diem, git-r-dun, life of the party type over the past few years but the truth is, I'm lazy and get overwhelmed very easily. Nobody, and I mean nobody including myself, thought I was actually going to pack up my car and drive across the country to Las Vegas. So, I did it to prove to myself and others that I can make a plan and stick to it and jump with both feet, as it were. It happens that I jumped with both feet into a situation that blew, but at least I did it.
The second reason is that I thought Emily's brother, David, could hook me up instantaneously with a highly lucrative cocktail waitressing job, or at least set me on the right track to do it. This alleged part of the bargain unravelled swiftly, but only in the final 2 months leading up to my move out there (and really only in the last couple weeks) by which time I felt I was too committed to my plan to change course.
What happened to the cocktail waitressing plan?
I first was alerted to the hiring difficulties by Emily, who had arrived there several months before I and was struggling to find a job. This, however, worried me significantly less than her warning that the casinos drug-tested prospective employees.
Now, I think I fall on the eminently reasonable end of the drug-use scale. I am not a saint, however, I also kept up a 3.75 GPA in college and at no point have ever felt like I was beholden to any substances (save tobacco, more on that later). I've never done meth or heroin or crack and dammit, so what if I like a spliff every now and again? Anyways, once I was alerted to the casino drug-testing policy I was abstinent as a motherfucker. However, this news came in mid-August and I was moving there in early September so I wasn't left with much time to get my act together. The killshot came when I learned that casinos don't just drug test, they drug tested hair.
Now, on the off chance that anyone reading this is unfamiliar with basic drug culture (you can't seriously be enjoying this blog), drug testing urine is the golden standard--pun intended. A forgiving procedure easily duped by various potions available for purchase online, drinking tons of water/cranberry juice, and working out like crazy; the urine test is annoying but dealable if given sufficient notice. Even a committed couch-potato like myself could piss clean in a month if I bit the bullet & hit the gym. Marijuana, as anyone who has made weed brownies can attest, is lipid-soluble and thus is stored in body fat. This means that people with low body fat-- men, theoretically-- excrete all traces of marijuana much faster than those with a higher percentage-- women. This has kind of been turned on its ass by the obesity epidemic but it is a fact, nonetheless, that women just have a lot more body fat and probably fail drug tests a lot more often. The glass ceiling rears its ugly head! But I digress... The point is that hair testing is an entirely different-- and much more sinister-- animal altogether.
Your hair (wow, this is turning into a tutorial) is like a fossil record of your drug use. Every centimeter is, roughly speaking, a month. Whatever you ingested, through whatever orifice, is dutifully built into the hair shaft by Mother Nature for Quest Diagnostics to examine. These drug tests allegedly just look at the last 3 months/centimeters nearest your scalp but I'm assuming having longer hair is not a boon in such scenarios. I might note, again, how this procedure in all likelihood results in more women than men failing a drug test but I'll stick to the point. In a blind panic, I read about people who shaved their heads and then had to provide pubes as samples, about the tendency for cocaine, specifically, to "travel along the shaft" of one's hair, making the 3 month limit cold comfort for fans of the china girl-- not that that fact had any bearing on me-- and generally about how impossible it is to beat a hair test. In the interest of someday getting a real job, I will refrain from further incriminating myself explicitly. What I will say is that I had just graduated from college, had had a wonderful senior spring and followed it up with a very relaxed summer working part-time and living with friends. In other words, I was fucked. IF nothing had travelled up any shafts AND my hair grew at an average clip, I could hope to maybe pass a drug test in early November. The other option was to "strip" my hair, a process that effectively gives your hair all the damage of dyeing it without the exciting new color. Needless to say I was underwhelmed by my options.
Another blow to the making-$100,000-a-year-waitressing-in-trashy-outfits plan came when Lehman Brothers imploded and took the rest of the country with it in September, 2008. Obviously, the tourism industry dried up faster than an aging hooker's twat and the odds of anywhere hiring pretty much evaporated. Still... Hooters was hiring.
The death knell of my plan to work in a casino (it was pretty well maimed already) came when I attempted to apply to work at Hooters. I drove down to the strip, parked in their lot and went inside. After wandering the casino floor for 20 minutes in a daze, searching unsuccessfully for a helpful sign saying: "HR Office" or something of the ilk, I finally asked a Hooters girl where I could apply. It seemed to me that given the job's requirement that you fill out their shorts 'n' tanktop getup nicely, it would be to their advantage to conduct hiring in person. Not so. Like the other mega-corporations populating Las Vegas Blvd., everything was done online. I managed to make it through the first ten pages-- yes, that's the first 10-- without losing it. I gave them my SSN, detailed a 10-year work history (not an easy feat considering this meant accounting for every month of my life since I was 12) and thought I was cruising to the finish line when I ran headfirst into the References page. I needed to provide no less than five professional references with complete contact information. Now, given my scholarly ways, I haven't had a ton of bosses since I was 12 for fuck's sake and generally, when applying to other jobs, I tend to list at least a few professors. Oh sure, I could list five people alright, but could I live with the knowledge that they very well might receive a call from Hooters asking about me? In my imagination it went something like this:
"Hello?"
"Hello, I'm trying to reach Professor Smith."
"This is he."
"Hi Mr. Smith, this is Judy from the Hooters Hotel & Casino calling in regards to a certain Lucy ___? She put you down as a reference on her application to be a Wings-n-Pitchers Wench."
"Hooters, eh? *jots down my name with note: NEVER WRITE LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION, (PROBABLY A CRACK WHORE)* Go on."
Needless to say, I didn't complete the application.
