ld care less where the money went as long as they had a fair chance of winning and their play rendered them free rooms, free shows, and free food. It was symbiotic - a mutually advantageous relationship. Any worker foolish enough to try to cheat the uniquely expert cheaters at the top, found their final reward in the unforgiving desert where flesh melts quickly and bone fragments blow quickly away in the beds of long-dry rivers.

Then

A certain amount of oversight is involved in almost any job. The more important, the more highly skilled, the more successful the position, the lower the degree of oversight. At the bottom rung of the economic and social ladder - the laborers, the maids, the easily replaceable positions - the more watchful are the powers that be, the less secure are the workers, the more personally vulnerable are they to any mistakes made.

When money or similar valuables are intermixed with poorly paid employees, the level of oversight reaches outsized and intrusive proportions. Diamond workers in South Africa submit to body cavity searches after every shift, a humiliation society normally limits to convicted felons or known drug traffickers.

In the United States, low-level workers in finance and banking are closely observed for cash or figure discrepancies. Too many errors lead inevitably to termination. The larger the amounts of money involved, the more significant the mistakes become. A fast food register a few cents out of balance differs markedly from a bank cashier imbalance of several hundred dollars.

The more pure cash is involved, the more difficulty there is in tracing a paper trail of transactions to establish where a discrepancy occurred. I just returned from three days in Las Vegas, the American capital of cash. Surely nowhere else in the country handles the thousands of hundred dollar bills that change hands in that town, to the tune of several billion dollars annually.

For years, in the counting rooms it was one pile for the house, one pile for the government, and one pile for "the boys." Untold millions were siphoned off for the East Coast crime czars. The government hated being cheated of their fair share. The gamblers could care less where the money went as long as they had a fair chance of winning and their play rendered them free rooms, free shows, and free food. It was symbiotic - a mutually advantageous relationship. Any worker foolish enough to try to cheat the uniquely expert cheaters at the top, found their final reward in the unforgiving desert where flesh melts quickly and bone fragments blow quickly away in the beds of long-dry rivers.

Then

or similar valuables are intermixed with poorly paid employees, the level of oversight reaches outsized and intrusive proportions. Diamond workers in South Africa submit to body cavity searches after every shift, a humiliation society normally limits to convicted felons or known drug traffickers.

In the United States, low-level workers in finance and banking are closely observed for cash or figure discrepancies. Too many errors lead inevitably to termination. The larger the amounts of money involved, the more significant the mistakes become. A fast food register a few cents out of balance differs markedly from a bank cashier imbalance of several hundred dollars.

The more pure cash is involved, the more difficulty there is in tracing a paper trail of transactions to establish where a discrepancy occurred. I just returned from three days in Las Vegas, the American capital of cash. Surely nowhere else in the country handles the thousands of hundred dollar bills that change hands in that town, to the tune of several billion dollars annually.

For years, in the counting rooms it was one pile for the house, one pile for the government, and one pile for "the boys." Untold millions were siphoned off for the East Coast crime czars. The government hated being cheated of their fair share. The gamblers could care less where the money went as long as they had a fair chance of winning and their play rendered them free rooms, free shows, and free food. It was symbiotic - a mutually advantageous relationship. Any worker foolish enough to try to cheat the uniquely expert cheaters at the top, found their final reward in the unforgiving desert where flesh melts quickly and bone fragments blow quickly away in the beds of long-dry rivers.

Then

nevitably to termination. The larger the amounts of money involved, the more significant the mistakes become. A fast food register a few cents out of balance differs markedly from a bank cashier imbalance of several hundred dollars.

The more pure cash is involved, the more difficulty there is in tracing a paper trail of transactions to establish where a discrepancy occurred. I just returned from three days in Las Vegas, the American capital of cash. Surely nowhere else in the country handles the thousands of hundred dollar bills that change hands in that town, to the tune of several billion dollars annually.

For years, in the counting rooms it was one pile for the house, one pile for the government, and one pile for "the boys." Untold millions were siphoned off for the East Coast crime czars. The government hated being cheated of their fair share. The gamblers could care less where the money went as long as they had a fair chance of winning and their play rendered them free rooms, free shows, and free food. It was symbiotic - a mutually advantageous relationship. Any worker foolish enough to try to cheat the uniquely expert cheaters at the top, found their final reward in the unforgiving desert where flesh melts quickly and bone fragments blow quickly away in the beds of long-dry rivers.

Then

apital of cash. Surely nowhere else in the country handles the thousands of hundred dollar bills that change hands in that town, to the tune of several billion dollars annually.

For years, in the counting rooms it was one pile for the house, one pile for the government, and one pile for "the boys." Untold millions were siphoned off for the East Coast crime czars. The government hated being cheated of their fair share. The gamblers could care less where the money went as long as they had a fair chance of winning and their play rendered them free rooms, free shows, and free food. It was symbiotic - a mutually advantageous relationship. Any worker foolish enough to try to cheat the uniquely expert cheaters at the top, found their final reward in the unforgiving desert where flesh melts quickly and bone fragments blow quickly away in the beds of long-dry rivers.

Then

ld care less where the money went as long as they had a fair chance of winning and their play rendered them free rooms, free shows, and free food. It was symbiotic - a mutually advantageous relationship. Any worker foolish enough to try to cheat the uniquely expert cheaters at the top, found their final reward in the unforgiving desert where flesh melts quickly and bone fragments blow quickly away in the beds of long-dry rivers.

Then the corporations moved in and "the boys" faded away into their old street rackets and the burgeoning drug trade. The corporate-owned casinos are no longer in the business of skimming: they can make legitimate returns for their shareholders through the huge returns guaranteed by the house advantage in every transaction. To add to the gaming cash, they moved to ensure a profit in related areas: rooms, food, and shows.

Even the owners and managers, with their accounting-oriented perspective on the world, recognize their vulnerability to greed, cheating, and theft in the huge cash side of their business.

Casino worker oversight, while not yet approaching the body-cavity-search level, is perhaps the most organized and intrusive in the western world. It ranges from dealers clapping and showing open, empty hands, to two or more floor walkers (depending on the size of the jackpot) co-signing on every hand-pay slot win. It involves floor men watching every table bet, box men watching every roll of the dice and its payoff stacks of chips. It requires supervisors to watch the floor men, managers to watch the supervisors, undercover security men to watch both workers and guests, and eye-in-the-sky overhead cameras that can observe and detect every one of a million transactions per day.

Does all this monitoring and second-guessing have an effect on employees? Personal trust is something we rate highly. Talk with someone whose spouse has cheated on them and you will find that the emotional pain has little to do with sex but everything to do with the loss of trust and the doubt that a relationship can ever really survive such a loss. Although secondary to intimate relationships, we would like our coworkers and supervisors to trust us also, as