As I walked back to my very nice large room in the new Augustus tower at Caesars tonight there was a security guy with a podium waiting by the elevators. He asked the couple walking ahead of me for their room key. I went to reach for mine from my pocket but he waved me on. "You work here, go ahead", he said. Sure I was wearing a Caesars logo jacket, but even if that looks like a uniform (which it doesn't) and even if employees use the customer elevators (which I'm sure they don't) what would I be doing there at 2am without a room service cart or luggage or something?
I have all my Mansion freebies now, except for one surprise that we apparently get at the taping tomorrow. Everything came in a rather nice sports bag. There's a baseball cap, a too small t-shirt , a deck of cards, two round but rather sharp silver things that I can only assume are meant to be card protectors, a book about how to play poker (just in case I qualified by accident?) and a badge. Yes, a badge. What am I? Twelve?
The $50 food credit is a swipeable gift card for any of the Caesars restaurants (but not the Forum Shops, so no Cheesecake Factory) and it looks like it will last a while, which is great because I'm never going to spend it all by Sunday. The $500 casino credit is a stack of green chips, some of which have Celine Dion's head on them. I cashed them in and went over the road to play $2/$4 at the IP instead.
At the cage there are separate lines for diamond level players and all other plebs, as there are almost everywhere now. I'm still waiting for the diamond urinal and vip washbasin to appear in the gents, it won't be long before you have to show a player's card to have a piss. All I wanted to do was walk up to the pleb counter - three clerks, one customer, nobody waiting. But that wasn't to be my decision. They have someone waiting there to ask whether you are special, and presumably if you are you can't just use any old counter, it has to be the vip one, as long as you stop and rummage through your pockets to produce the right coloured card. It did make me wonder what else, other than a separate line, the diamond members were getting. Do they valet park the notes into your wallet for you?
