Recently, we asked the casino employees of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us some secrets and stories about what it's really like to work at a casino. Here's what they said.
1. "Grown adults will wear diapers and poop and pee themselves because they don't want to give up their slot machines."
2. "Working at the front desk, you got a LOT of wives calling at 3 a.m. crying and asking us to let them know if their husbands were there, and to tell them to come home. We were unfortunately not allowed to do that because of our privacy policy."
3. "One time, a man died at a slot machine where I work and nobody noticed for hours. He was blue and cold when the medics got there from downstairs."
4. "I worked as a slot attendant — the fun job where you pay out jackpots. One afternoon, a machine went off and we’re trained to be excited and congratulatory, but this woman was crying, and not happy tears either. She told me her dad had just had a heart attack and was in the hospital. Talk about a situation to be in! We rushed getting her jackpot, paid her out, and the poor thing ran out of there so fast."
5. "After we reopened during the pandemic, the most common form of payment being used were the unemployment cards. I can’t tell you the amount of times people have told me they gambled their rent away."
6. "Something about casinos attracts scumbags. Even the employees. Every single married employee at both casinos I worked at in Los Angeles were cheating on their spouses. They were having sex with the regulars and getting pregnant by other married employees. It was a shitshow."
7. "Customers will come into the restaurants expecting to get free food because they blew their whole paycheck at the casino. They'd also steal the most random things, like sugar caddies, salt and pepper shakers, utensils, and cloth napkins all because they feel entitled to it since they spend so much money at the casino."
8. "We recently had a pooping incident. Their host went to our employee wardrobe and asked for an extra pair of uniform pants, and the player just continued on with their gambling."
9. "Our cleaning department unfortunately finds people dead from overdoses semi-regularly. Mind you, this is at a regular old casino chain location."
10. "One time, this man and his wife came to the front desk to ask if the casino could pay for them to get a cab ride home since they lost all of their money. They lost all their money and didn't even have enough for bus fare."
11. "When we reopened in June last year after the first surge of COVID, we had most of the usual crowd. This included middle-aged adults who take their elderly parents to the casino because they're responsible for caring for them. Elderly parents on oxygen tanks and in wheelchairs who are basically forced to sit next to their gambling-addict children at the height of the pandemic."
12. "I had an older woman with her husband tell me (in front of him) how he has to wear maxi pads when they went to the casino because he plays so long that he ‘dribbles’ (pees his pants). He was super embarrassed. She called it his ‘casino equipment.'"
13. "My mom was a casino dealer for a few years. She once waited and waited for another employee to 'tap her out' — aka replace her — so she could go on break, but no one did, so she crapped her pants."
14. And FINALLY: "My great-grandfather, a lifelong career criminal, worked as a casino employee for a London gang. This was in the 1950s when gambling was illegal, so they disguised their casino as a gentlemen's club. One night, a bunch of guys came in and one of them drank so much that he passed out. He was put on a chaise lounge nearby to sleep it off while his friends continued playing cards. A couple of hours later, they discovered that he wasn't breathing. Once they confirmed he was 100% dead, nobody on the site wanted to be caught gambling, so the club had some employees — including my great-granddad — carry the body to an actual gentleman's club next door, where they left him in a chair where he'd be 'discovered' dead."
Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.