*Ring – ring – ring* “Hello, this is the Whiner Hot Line, Martha Moaner speaking.”
“Where the hell is that Billy guy?”
“What? What Billy guy?”
“You know the freak that never watches TV or knows what’s going on in the rest of the world?”
*Whisper* “Yes…I do know who you are talking about. That’s Billy Bellyacher. He’s off today.”
“Shit! I really wanted to twist up his spring and then watch him spin out of control and into orbit. When is he going to be on shift?”
“Well…we really don’t have shifts here. This is strictly volunteer. And even though I confidentially acknowledged that I know Billy, I don’t know you. So what’s up?”
“Are you sure you want to know? I never trust you volunteer guys. You might be setting up a game plan for Jerry Springer or some idiot TV show and you need content. If you got paid, I’d feel a lot better off spilling my guts to you.”
“Ok. How about this one? I give you my paypal info and you send me a donation. If that won’t work, get into what you want to talk about or I’m dropping the connection.”
“Kee-rist! Don’t be so damn sensitive. I’ll get there.”
“Is this Wendy?”
“Oh – my – God!”
“Well, Wendy, you do have a bit of a reputation with all the volunteer staff here…is it you? If it is, you could make my day. I love celebrity call-ins.”
“Really? Wow! I’m a celebrity?”
“To me, you are a star.”
“Ok. Let’s talk then. When I tell you how my day went, you won’t believe it.”
“I’ve heard everything Wendy.”
“Not even! You ain’t heard nothing until you hear it from me. Got it Martha?”
“Right on, Wendy.”
“Well, it goes like this. I’m on LOA for two months. It just started on Friday, the LOA that is, or actually on Saturday after I finished my shift on Friday.”
“Yeah, I’ve been reading your case and keeping up with ‘you’.”
“Then stop interrupting me for crap’s sake.”
“Sorry…”
“Ok, Martha, I have to work almost my full shift on Friday, walk out the door into the heat of the desert, leaving behind the heat of a million wannabes that crowd into a poker room and try to destroy each other financially in a game of poker…”
*pause*
“Wow! I can’t believe I just said that. It was frigging beautiful…the million wannabes…”
“I’m with you, Wendy, but let’s move along here.”
“Ok…ok! I haven’t even had time to figure out what an LOA is like because there’s too much going on to even kick back and relax for five seconds.”
“Well, fill me in.”
“I can’t sleep. Right? I can’t put anything together in my head right now that lets me relax and just pass out. It’s brutal.”
“Wendy, is that part of the aging process?”
“Listen Martha, you start with age with me and I’ll kick your ass. I just can’t sleep. Get it?”
“Ok…Wendy…”
“Alrighty then. I do some writing on my website…”
“You have a website? Incredible! What’s it about?”
“Martha, you couldn’t have been following my file too closely. Tell the truth…I’m not a star to you am I” *heavy sigh*
“Oh yes. Wendy…please…I just didn’t know you had a website. Go ahead…”
“Well, I did some writing, and I played three $109 buy-in SNG’s on PartyPoker.”
“What’s that? A SNG?”
“Single table tournaments, poker, get it? DOH!”
“Oh…yeah, yeah. Go ahead!”
“I win one of them, giving me about $180 win overall so I buy into the $215 – 9 seats guaranteed in the WSOP event at 6 p.m. on Sunday.”
“God! Wendy, help me out here. What does all that mean?”
“I play poker – got it? I’m trying to win a seat in the ‘big one’ at the WSOP. The $10,000 final event that the whole world wants to win. You’ve heard of Chris Moneymaker, right?”
“Uhhhhh…yeah…Chris Moneymaker. Do you figure that’s his real name?”
“Hell yes. Who would make that shit up?”
“Ok, Wendy. OK. Just go on.”
“So I have a real problem with time zones, they always start their crap three hours ahead of me and it’s in military time. I hate it. Why not just tell me what time I have to be there in plain old ‘Time Speak’?”
“Ya know what, Wendy? I totally agree, just like all these people that want to come to America but they don’t want to learn English. WTF?”
“Right on, Martha! I knew I liked you.
“Along about Sunday a.m. – right into the wee hours of the morning – I was registered for the event, trying to do a few things around my place – and trying to figure out a way to make myself lay down and just SLEEP for a few hours. Hello phone call from my sis. She was heading into Vegas from Primm, her beau and her are long haul truck drivers. We made the deal that she would call me when she hit Boulder Highway and we’d meet for breakfast.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Hell no. I was up when she called about 8 a.m. She was already parked – about 300 yards from my coach.”
“Coach?”
“Yeah, I live in a fifth wheel.”
“You mean a trailer down by the river?”
“Get the hell off of it, Martha. Have you been talking to Ken?”
“Ken who?”
“Ok…just get off of it. It ain’t a trailer, it’s a fifth wheel, and there ain’t any rivers even close to me. I’m in the damn desert and it’s over 100 degrees every day right now.”
“Ok…sorry. So you registered to play the tournament, your sister’s in town, you’re going to eat breakfast, what happens next?”
“We hit the breakfast buffet at Nevada Palace, and they are serving champagne. Sis wants some so why would I let her drink alone? I opt for a few glasses myself. We gorge. And can you believe it? They really did have their little three table card room running. A tournament I suppose…after food and drinks, we decide to play 5c keno for an hour or so. I finally gave up and headed back to the coach for a nap.
“I slept for about five hours. The alarm went off, I seriously considered just going online and canceling my registration to the tournament so I could sleep a few hours longer. But instead, I got up, made coffee, and tuned into PartyPoker. The tournament would start in about 30 minutes. I knew we might have plans to hang out with my son and grandson and sis’s son and grandson but nothing was written in stone so I got my coffee and the tournament started.”
“Wow! Were you playing NLH? Like they do on TV?”
*snorts* “Of course! What else is there?”
“Well, I play a few free money games now and then…”
“Get over it, Martha, free money ain’t where it’s at. You need to get into the real world. But at least you’re further ahead of the game than Billy. He doesn’t know anything about poker and TV. I knew I liked you, Martha.”
“Thanks, Wendy. that really means a lot to me…”
“So quit interrupting me and I can get on with the story…”
“Sorry…don’t stop…”
“Just as I start to try to get into the game/table I’m at, sis arrives. She’s ready to cook, I’m still trying to play the game, and get set up for family. Sis cranks up a little mini BBQ, out on the patio, and as I’m trying to play my game – through the window – I see a plastic bag start to drift towards the flaming BBQ, (that sits about a foot off the ground), as the wind pulls the bag closer, I just know it’s going to ignite and then fly off in the wind and start a fire. Sure as hell, the bag glues itself to the side of the BBQ and starts to burn. Kee-rist!!! I run out with a shoe – and don’t even consider laughing over this – because there was nothing else to pull the bag away from the BBQ with and stop the bag from flying away. So much for concentrating on the tournament.
“But I was back in a heart beat only to receive a phone call from my son, Darian. He was on the way with steaks and food. He was brining Riot, Chad, and Eric with him.”
“Riot?”
“Yes. Riot. My grandson. When he’s 14, I can say, ‘Quiet – Riot’.”
“What does that mean?”
“Shit! Are you for real, Martha? Don’t give me that stuff that you play poker and know what’s going on if you don’t know what ‘Quiet Riot’ is all about.”
“Jeez. Wendy, stop it. It’s been a long day for me too.”
“Yeah, you’re right. I’m a little strung out right now.”
*pause*
“See the tournament starts with 716 players. Nine seats are guaranteed to be given away to the WSOP event. With all the entries, 13 seats are being given away. I play – when I have to stop to do something, sis clicks on the action. Twice when I was away from the computer, she picked up A-A. I scurried back to play the hand. No action. Can you believe it…no frigging action. Then Riot, Darian, Chad, and Eric show. Sis is cooking steaks like a mad woman, the microwave is nuking baked potatoes, Riot is screaming for ‘Hurry’ because he wants to watch Harry Potter, it’s a 1,000 degrees outside and BOOM! The power goes out.
“This same shit happened about two weeks ago. Only then, a maintenance man was on duty, it only took him two hours to get to the coach. I have a generator so I cranked it up, the power was back on. I was back in ‘the game’.
“But nothing is ever easy. I tried to get voice on the DVD and nothing worked. Riot was running around in screamer mode for ‘Hurry’. Finally – after turning off the DVD and starting over, it worked. It might have been a glitch from the power just shutting off.
“And then I called Nevada Palace Casino because the RV office was closed. I told them I had no power. She informed me that they had nothing to do with the RV part of it and the RV was closed for the day. I wanted to scream, “NO SHIT?” but I composed myself by explaining that the same thing had happened two weeks ago and it was 150 degrees out right now and I had no power. She told me that I could take a room for the night at the hotel but I would have to pay for it. ”
*heavy breathing*
“Do you know how close I came to telling her she should go fuck herself, Martha?”
“Wendy, we don’t tolerate that kind of language. But I’m with you. What did you do?”
“I said, ‘THANKS FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!’ and hung up.”
“I hope that bitch’s car blew up on the way home from work, Wendy.”
“Ahhh…thanks, Martha. But you know life is hard on us if we think that way. Best to let it go.”
“So then what happened?”
“The blinds were going up and up and up in the tournament, players were dropping like flies, and I did pick up Q-Q and raised it to four thousand-something all-in, that was after there was a raise to over one thousand in front of me, with three callers. They all called. Damn if I didn’t flop a set and it was good. I was in the chips for awhile. I managed to pick up a few more blinds and busted one player but I was nowhere. I finally made a stand with A-J for about $4K. I got one caller. He had 9-9. I was out in 61st place.”
“God! That really sucks, Wendy. You were only 48 players out of a seat.”
“Tell me about it. The best part of all of it was that I had some great time with the family. The food was great. But then I have to worry about the generator running all night just to keep me from roasting to death.”
“What can you do?”
“Nothing. Sis’s beau, Monte, went out with me to check the breakers again on the electrical hook-up. They were limp and wouldn’t reset…just like there were two weeks ago. Monte used to be an electrician so we started hunting – in the dark with a flashlight – for other sites that might have 50 amp breakers and no tenants. We were going to steal those breakers and swap them for the faulty one on my site. That’s seriously a first for me, trying to burglarize breakers in the middle of the night.”
“Did you find any?
“Nope. Only 30’s. We gave up after a half an hour. Everyone left me for the night. Then the breaker on the generator went south. I ended up turning off the generator, writing a lengthy note and heading for the RV office to shove the note through the door so I could have maintenance around first thing at 8 a.m. While I was at the RV office, a security guard was sitting – smoking and sucking down water – taking a break from his bike and the ’rounds’. We visited for about 15 minutes. I was starting to dehydrate and felt as if I would blow away in the wind that had sprung up in the last half hour.”
“What did you do then?
“I opened the ‘generator’ compartment on the coach, took the door off the generator – using a towel because it’s a 1,000 degrees – reset the 30 and 20 amp breaker, closed it all up, came inside, turned on the main breakers in the coach, and magic happened. Air conditioning – the wondrous marvel of the 20th century – popped on and I had cool air.”
“Kee-rist! Wendy, that’s unbelievable.”
“Hey…Martha…I really like you, but lay off of ‘Kee-rist’ because that’s mine.”
“Ok…don’t get sensitive on me now. We’ve been through a lot together this last hour.”
“Sure, you’re right. I’m just on edge. Listen – you’re the best. I’ve never had a volunteer like you. I don’t know how I would have made it through the next few hours without you…” *sniff*
“It’s ok, Wendy. We both have gained a lot from the last hour. Just relax and try to get some sleep. That’s part of what the problem was to begin with, right?”
“Right. I feel a lot better right now. Goodnight, Martha.”
“Goodnight, Wendy.”
*dial tone*