I slayed at the Mohegan Sun

The casino that doesn't want you to get there and dissuades you from gambling when you do. Overcoming all customer service barriers, I left the cyber insurance crowd in joyous tears, begging for more.

OK, straight up - I loathe people who break their word. Every single treaty that the American government signed with Native American tribes is a binding obligation on the taxpayer. Given the spotty history of the Federal Government - what a surprise! - doing the right thing by, well, anyone, it is obvious that Leviathan’s relationship with many tribes has been suboptimal.

That does not excuse the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut from supplying crappy customer service. 95,002 wrongs don’t make a right.

Your gentle author, wondering what vile surprise awaits him on the casino floor.

Firstly, getting to Uncasville, CT wherein lies the res, I got to enjoy the Amtrak local train heading out of New York’s exciting new Moynihan Station. I liked it better as a post office. But I do love watching the industrial decay along the East Coast’s railway lines, interspersed with views of Atlantic tributaries.

For six days before I was due to headline at the Mohegan Sun, I kept calling the casino resort hotel to ask how to get there if one were coming without a car. I was never able to get a live person on the phone. I was however diverted to an automated system that assured me repeatedly that once I arrived at the New London train station, all I had to do was walk outside and take the ever-present, always-there, totally-a-thing Mohegan Shuttle which would whisk me to their overpriced revenge in the middle of nowhere levied on bored gambling addicts and the occasional convention-goer.

The astute reader will have experience with foreshadowing.

Imagine my surprise when I got to New London and went outside to look for the Shuttle. Not a Mohegan Sun-branded transport in sight. There was some fun with the Amtrak ticket agent who looked at me like I was soft in the head and said she thought maybe there once was a shuttle back before the Wuhan Fakedemic.

I got to the depressing casino set in a depressingly brown early spring Connecticut in an alternative conveyance. When I checked in, I relayed to the young man about the automated phone service directing guests to a shuttle that did not exist. He looked at me oddly and said, “Yeah. I wouldn’t depend on that.”

Not quite the response I expected. I followed up with, “Shouldn’t you make a note of it, tell a manager or something so they can, you know, change that?” He shrugged.

Logistical difficulties aside, I was there as the headlining keynote speaker with some colleagues at a cyber insurance conference, sharing the brilliant technical innovation they had come up with. That went swimmingly - we killed it in the big room and our purpose for being there was vindicated.

The second - and weirder - departure from good customer service came that evening. We wandered down to the empty casino floor. We figured we’d shove some cash into the machines full of flashy lights for a bit on the off chance of winning a few dollars before the flashing lights gave us seizures. My colleague put $20 into a machine, which took the money. Nothing happened. No credit was registered. No bill came shooting back out. Nothing.

So he hit the “assistance” button which lit up a bulb on top of the machine.

No one came over.

One of our group went off and found a casino employee, who came back to the bill-gobbling machine.

The casino guy sat down, put in some kind of management card into the machine, punched a couple of buttons and then accused my colleague of lying. “You already played the machine,” he said. Now, I can only assume casino workers deal with degenerate scumbags all day long and there is no such thing in a gambling establishment as “customer service” the way a normal person would define it.

This guy basically accused all of us of lying over $20. We certainly did not linger to shove any more money into their thieving machines, so I guess the tribe scored that one bill off the Evil, Treaty-Violating Americans.

The Mohegans can bite me.