Casino cops are coming if we can't move all this cash in a hurry Welcome again to On-Call, El Reg's Friday foray into readers' reminiscences of things that went wrong in the night. This week, meet “James” who once worked “for a company that provided accounting systems for Las Vegas casinos.” As James reminds us, “Casinos, or 'gaming' as it's called in Nevada, are a 24/7 operation and never …
We've had so many 'ventilation blocked by X' stories, but I don't think anything: dust, manure, deceased rodents; will beat this.
I once heard a story of a rat, who sneaked into a particle accelerator while it was being refurbished. Once the maintenance was complete and the vacuum inside restored, he became a much bigger, vacuum-dried and vaguely cube-shaped rat - and promptly blocked the beam. After much prodding a cussing, he was discovered in one of the chambers and extracted.
One of the engineers involved had the remains epoxy-coated, and kept it above his workbench as a curio. Apparently if the right side of the grey cube was facing you, you could still make out the outline of the very surprised rodent face.
What about Flour?
I used to work at a flour mill and a PC behind a panel stopped working, wasn't supported by us but agreed to have a look.
Taking the panel off realised it wasn't a panel pc, a tower pc was behind and it was filled with fine flour dust (Tower pc was half popping out of it), as always I'm amazed at how long pcs in these conditions will often be last.
"...and it was filled with fine flour dust (Tower pc was half popping out of it), as always I'm amazed at how long pcs in these conditions will often be last."
I've also baffled how much metallic dust computers can intake while still functioning well. The sure way to kill these computers is then to blow the dust away and ensure that some of it gets into critical niches and end up short circuiting the whole thing - so let it be!
Maybe.
Or maybe they had the dad of the hapless casino owner buying repeatedly stacks of chips with cash until the vault fills up so that the casino does not declare bankruptcy when it has to pay interest on its loans on the next business day.
That, of course, is a purely hypothetical situation. Never ever happened you know.
Which wouldn't have made sense since December 31 would've been a Saturday, and when due dates fall on a weekend (and it would make sense to have the due date on the end of the calendar year because tax reporting switches with the new year, too), you often have to pay up on the LAST business day before then, meaning it would've been due on the previous Friday, the 30th, and this would've been too late.
Oh, I don't know about that end of the year thing. Might not be a problem if they were doing some check kiting to cover their payments. Of course, that's highly illegal in quite a few countries. Doesn't stop it from happening, though.
The wife worked for a guy who was kiting about US$400M quite regularly. It all came tumbling down, eventually, when he was forced into bankruptcy. But, she got to talk to a lot of interesting men and women from various TLAs (Three Letter Agencies; e.g., FBI, SEC, etc.). Fortunately, she was just a low level accountant, and the owner had the good sense to die before they brought criminal charges against him.
Strangely, they never did account for about US$40M from that company. Sadly, we certainly didn't end up with any of it (They actually shafted her out of a couple of weeks of vacation.). I wonder if the missing funds were because of that industrial-sized shredder that they had running in hyper-overdrive for the week previous to the bankruptcy filing?
Unfortunately I don't think so. Having worked IT for a very large casino myself, I can tell you that they pay shit, treat you like something worse than shit, and expect you to live there 24/7. If you have the "nerve" to go home to sleep a few hours every few days, "you are not a team player".
After 26 years in IT, that was the very worst job I have ever had. To see the pallets of cash coming in every day, then to get paid crap and treated like property, you want to get out of this hell on about your second day there!.
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