Monday, March 29, 2004

One More Reason I Don’t Gamble

The news story was on early, I only listened with half an ear.  It seems that people were getting sick at casinos.  They interviewed a British-sounding woman who spoke as if she were holding a lit candle in her mouth; she described the mechanism of contagion, saying that we should imagine someone in the gambling parlor suddenly needing to rush to the facilities for purposes of self-evacuation.  (She said this a bit more graphically, actually, but women with a British accent can say words like “diarrhea” and it still sounds classy, while I use a word like “evacuate” and people in other time zones feel like they have to take a shower.)

SO: they’re in the facilities, “facilitating,” and then they return to the gaming rooms without having taken the trouble thoroughly to cleanse themselves.  The scenario the British woman painted concerned people trotting back and forth from the slot machines to the bathrooms, moving from one soiled one-armed bandit to the next, exchanging new varieties of coliform bacteria with every handle they pull. 

But really, British lady, that’s not the most significant way to spread disease in a casino and you know it.  Even in my somnolent state I knew that, in a casino, there is one place where everybody gets their hands into the pot together, where chips and dice are shared and fondled by indiscriminate groups, where folk stand around a pit and rub everything inside of it with eager sweaty fingers.  That’s where the intenstinal distress is most likely to originate and spread, but I bet that the sophisticated demure English woman knew, without even trying, that she couldn’t mention the craps table on air without cracking up.