Day 315! Today’s the day to finally complete my RCG! I knew I was going to need to get this when I started working at the hotel, but I just haven’t had the time to do it yet! Well, today I finally had the time… and, it was a bit boring. But at least it’s out of the way for now.

Usually I’ve been waking up at 8:30am… but today, I needed to be up at 8am! What made today different? I had a class at 9am that I needed to log into the Zoom classroom by 8:45am.

So I quickly showered, got ready for my day, and made breakfast.

After I scarfed down breakfast, I logged onto my class. I thought initially it was going to be a mix of in person and online, but it was a 100% online class with people from all over the state of NSW.

The teacher, named Graham, was a quirky older man who had a passion for the gambling rules and regulations in Australia. He was very strongly opinionated and would frequently go on random side rants and tangents. But overall, he was a very nice man originally from England.

There was a handful of us in the class, sitting through some pretty mind-numbingly boring material. But there were some interesting and helpful bits.

One of the most interesting tidbits of information I found out about, was that after Las Vegas, Australia has the most amount of poker machines. On top of that, gambling is very engrained in their culture. We had the Melbourne cup the other day… but horse racing and dog racing is pretty much on every day!

Of course everyone has access to the slot machines (called pokies here) and a game called kino, which is a luck based number/coin flip type game.

Graham talked us through a whole slew of PowerPoint slides, explaining how to deal with and talk to problem gamblers, how to help self exclude someone, and the roles of a RCG holder.

As an RCG holder, it’s my duty to catch the signs of gambling addiction, provide the information for support, and to be able to confidently talk with at risk or risk gamblers.

Through the 7 hour course, we had two Google form quizzes. The first was a 27 question multiple choice quiz… then Graham gave us “hints” that ended up being the answers to 2/3rds of the first quiz. The second assignment was a case study where we had to answer questions on how building a good report with gamblers could help you with spotting and communicating about gambling to a patron. It also asked about the signs and problem level, and discussed how you’d go about dealing with the situation.

This all took around 7 hours and in the middle we had a quick 30 minute break for lunch.

I made a couple PB&Js on some very lightly toasted bread. If I’m being completely honest and humble, the bread was toasted to perfection where the outside was crisp (not too crisp) and the inside was nice and soft.

Once the course was complete I signed out of the zoom meeting and took a nice 30 minute power nap. When I woke up I still had plenty of time before my work shift, so I watched an episode of Bleach and read more of the second Way of Kings book!

As always, I reluctantly put it down as I was getting into it, and got ready for work.

Tonight’s shift was a dinner to close shift. And for a Tuesday night, it was strangely busy. I had a bunch of fun chatting with customers and there was even a group from Colorado! There also was a Canadian couple too, so I guess the tourists are starting to escape the winter season back home.

I also met a person solo traveling down to Sydney who lived in Noosa, one of the other towns I was interested in moving too. She said she enjoyed Noosa, but Yamba was a better spot. Prettier and cheaper apparently!

The night continued on and there was one large group that didn’t want to leave, so we kept the bar open for them a bit later than we normally would on a Tuesday night. We probably started slowly closing the bar and restaurant around 9pm and fully finished closing closer to 11pm when I clocked off.

There was still more work to be done, but since I wasn’t forced to take a break, I couldn’t work past 6 hours. So I clocked off just before 11pm (when my shift ended officially at 10pm. This has become a common trend that I’ve tended to expect working at this bar).

I hung around a bit longer chatting with my coworkers and then started my walk home a little after 11pm.

When I got home I quickly heated up some leftover pasta, sauce, and chicken for dinner and then called it a night!

I’m very glad to have the RCG training finished and out of the way. There’s still a couple hoops to hop through before I officially get it, but for now I’ve done all that I can do.

Tomorrow I have a short shift during the lunch hour, probably longer than scheduled if I had a guess. But after that I’ll hopefully find the time to get the supplies needed to fix my surfboard and maybe even hit the beach!

– Elie