Wales #3 The Bingo Girl Diaries

I've started this particular entry so many times and have always pulled up short. It's about my job (of course it HAS to be about my job) but I honestly don't really know how to describe it. Either the job itself or how I feel about it.

So here goes. The accumulation of 17 years of study, a Bachelor in Communication Studies and a Masters in International Relations has led me to this.

I work at Rileys, which is a pool and snooker club. They have membership cards and a bar that I sometimes work at. But mostly I'm just the bingo girl. 
Don't misunderstand me here. I don't get to spin the ball cage and pull out a ping pong ball with a number on it. There's no microphone and witty repertoire for each number to memorise. I literally just print off a little ticket with numbers on it, and these numbers come up on the t.v. screens every 5 minutes or so.

It's alright guys. You can stop being so jealous of my high flying - multi layered career. 

It's actually the weirdest job in the world. Sometimes the place is packed, other times it's dead empty. If there are only two old men in the back corner playing snooker and neither of them want to buy a tickets... well... that's my next 4 hours sorted out. 

In this weird way... I'm kinda just really enjoying myself. There are a lot of regulars who come in and so in that sense it's turned out to be the best place to be for my first few weeks starting off in a few city because I've got to know a lot of faces. I've found myself walking down the street in Cardiff and bumping into people I know already. On my birthday I went out with some friends who came up from London, ended up bumping into a couple of the regular students who come into Rileys who knew it was my birthday and bought me drinks! 

So... a brief summary of the 'Regulars'

1. The Indians:

They're a bit chavvy, a bit 'lad-dy' and are there, never fail, every night. It's their 'local' and they alternate between being amazing at pool, playing the poker machines and proposing to me.

2. The Veterans:

The old men who have been coming in to play snooker there with their 6 buddies for the past 25 years. It was one of these many groups of veterans who come in who asked me the other night 'So, do you actually do anything or do you just walk around putting people off their snooker games for a living?' It definitely knocked any potential chip I'd been developing off my shoulders...

3. The Students:

Definitely the most fun. The people my own age recognise that a job (even a fairly useless and strange one like this one) is money, and money provides a place to live and means to enjoy oneself  They don't judge it, they just accept it, and often they'll buy a bingo ticket from me out of pity.

The manager has been amazing. When I waltzed in for the interview; bankaccount-less, home-less and largely uncontactable she basically said to me, "tell me how many hours you need, when you need them and how much you want to work. I'll sort it all out for you".
Somehow this woman turned bingo ticket selling into a full time job and since then that's pretty much what I've been up to this entire time...

...Of course I'm joking. I've done a lot of exploring already, gone out on the town a fair bit, caught myself already picking up the Welsh-isms and saying some of the really stupid sentences that they use here with complete sincerity. I've made a heap of friends. I have extensive travel plans which include Scotland and Ireland, and I'm planning a weekend Castle exploring extravaganza. 

Many more stories to come! Promise! :)
For now, I remain,
your humble bingo girl.