ohsostrange's Blog

I discovered on this trip to Vegas that when somebody dies while playing Bingo, the game doesn't stop.

I'm sitting in the Plaza's Bingo Room, when this woman stands up and falls over backward--dead as a doornail.  The way I know she was dead and not injured is that two security guards swooped in and one picked her up by the arms and the other by the legs and they carted her off like a big lumpy sack of potatoes, which is not how you treat somebody who's injured.  If she had been alive and in need of assistance, she would have been left exactly where she was until EMS got there, because the casino would have been risking a lawsuit otherwise.  No, she was definitely dead.  Apparently this happens often enough that they have it down to a routine.  When you die during Bingo (the average age of a player appears to be a bit over 80 so I'm guessing this happens a lot) they move you into a nearby room and cover you up until the meat wagon comes to get you.  While this is going on, they keep right on calling Bingo numbers.  Because they don't want to give anybody their money back, and they don't want to mess up their schedule.  Since they're afraid if they leave the dead bodies there, people won't settle down and resume play, they whisk the corpses off where the surviving Bingo-ers don't have to see and smell them.

And it works!!  People sit there and keep marking their cards!!  Because they don't want to miss out on winning some money, and they know they won't get their buy-in back. 

I'm not sure why this amazed me, but it did.