Training Day

I can honestly say that over the past year, there have been only a few meals that surpassed this one. Before me was an untouched cheese plate, sporting two brie wedges, a slab of gorgonzola, and some white and golden slices of cheddar. I sliced off a hunk of brie, rind included. This was after dishing up a salad, of course, and also some poached lobster tail, iced shrimp, and the same delicious salted salmon coated with savory spices. Moving up the buffet-style line, I also nabbed and English banger, and a slice of breaded cod.
Dessert was equally sumptuous. I had two types of crème brulee to choose from, as well as a mound of profiteroles, and some tender walnut coated fudge, or should I say fudge-like substance. It was definitely chocolate. I felt a twinge of guilt after eating all that I did.
So what occasion would demand such a feast? Lunch with the governor? A meeting with some other Tribal Council, perhaps? Far from it, really. No this meal was what I had heard of but never actually experienced, and that was the lunch accompanying the SMGI Board meeting that generally takes place the third Thursday of every month.
I’m not writing about this to inform people of some of the lesser-known excesses that seem so endemic to our business. Admittedly, though, I would be curious to know how much such a lunch costs. Stuff like that just fascinates me. Why I am writing about this is because a) it was my first official meeting as an SMGI Board member, assuming I am issued a license, not always a guarantee; and b) there was a certain level of professionalism that seemed casual and normal here that I feel the need to tell people about, because I can see now why given enough meals and meetings like this, Council/Board members might get a bit of an ego boost. You couldn’t help but feel important somehow, like a high profile executive.
There wasn’t much on our agenda for this meeting. But as a rule of thumb I guess all of Spirit Mountain Casino’s major Directors—Marketing, Gaming, Finance, etc. are still asked to sit in on these meetings, even though most of them spoke very little during the meeting. In fact some said almost nothing, they just sat there quietly watching Council and the Board discuss business and inevitably fall into, dare I say it, micromanaging. It occurs to me that we must sometimes be a bit of a spectacle.
I don’t have a whole heck of a lot of background knowledge in some of what was discussed, so trying to follow the discussion is honestly a little confusing. A couple of items in particular interest one Council member, so about an hour into the meeting Executive Session is called for, and all the staff present, with the exception of one Tribal attorney and the Finance Officer, are asked to leave and wait out in the hallway. I am going to honor the rules of Executive Session and not tell people here what went on in those two sessions. But I will say it saddened me to leave the room and see all these employees, some of them top directors waiting in the hallway while our conversation inside meanders on. I can’t help but think of the DMV. After nearly 45 minutes they are allowed back in, momentarily, while we attend to one other business item and then go back into Executive Session to talk about something I found a little bit questionable, given the amount of time spent dwelling on it. Staff are given permission to leave.
We end the meeting at about four in the afternoon. Of our nearly three-hour meeting, almost two hours of it is spent in Executive Session. And that was my first real foray into the world of Spirit Mountain Gaming, Incorporated. Productive? Maybe, though I don’t really have another meeting to compare it to. Informative? Definitely. Encouraging? I’ll have to think about that one.