Gambling with Whales

Today started off with the interesting lecture on housekeeping with Reneda. She showed us a clip of a reality show called "Undercover Boss," which was about the Choice Company CEO trying out employee jobs: housekeeping and maintenance officer. It was very interesting to get an inside look at some of the most important jobs in hotel operations. We continued our lecture with hotel hygiene after an hour on working with Mark on excel. We discussed about how housekeepers sometimes reuse dirty towels, resulting in the spread of contagious bacteria.  Reneda the showed us a news report on an investigation toward hotel sanitation a while back. It was a little too descriptive, informing us of the semen/urine stains on bed covers and bacteria like E-coli on surfaces most used by the guest.

After a lunch break, there was a class lecture on casinos, which was a very fascinating topic. It amazed me how Las Vegas, one of the first names that come in mind when talking about gambling, was not the top gambling city. It is actually third in the world to Macau and Singapore. I was also thoroughly impressed with how much money tourists spend on casinos. There are even names for the higher spending gamblers. People spending between $50,000 and $250,000 are called high rollers and people who spend even more are called Whales. For these people, the casinos would pay for everything, including a V.I.P room and expensive concerts so they would feel comfortable to gamble their huge amounts of money. Of the many casinos, the largest casino company was MGM, with over 50 casinos in 6 continents. This was by far the most interesting subject so far.

After class, Eric and I went to a mandatory meeting with the associate director of the summer program, Janna at 4:15 PM. There, we met Alex and Eric Wilson (Calvin had the meeting at 5:30. There were three other girls there from other programs. In the meeting, we all agreed to write a "thank you" letter to our donors to show our appreciation. We then conversed with Janna, telling her anything interesting that happened here. After about half an hour of chatting, I had 2 hours to relax before going to he lab.

Meeting up with my group there, we discussed how we were going to plan our report. We decided to split sections up and combine them at the end. Though we did our own sections, we still helped each other out. Hopefully, we would finish everything by Thursday evening, so I won't have to be sleep deprived come Friday.

It was a very productive day today. My group is nearly done with our final CHESS report. All that is needed is a quick touch up and adding everything together.