Seeing @moonman talk about a power outage at the casino reminds me of being in #, #, several years back. There was a big storm moving in (with tornadoes and everything) and lots of wind and rain, but it was drive to the casino or starve, so Mark and I met there, while S went to a different casino in another parish. We were already inside and eating when the power went out. It came back after 10-15 minutes, and they let us stay there and eat (but they were not serving new guests until power came back). After we finished, he went to play some slots and I started my trek back to the hotel. Power went out again before I got out of the building.

I hadn't taken my company cell phone with me, so when I got back, I found that management was freaking out about the storm and afraid that people may have been hurt or killed. One guy had gone to see a movie (on Christmas day, imagine that) and turned his phone off. They had called everyone at least twice (and they followed with another couple of calls after I got back to the hotel). It was probably almost 17:00 US-Central when the movie guy turned his phone back on and found that he had dozens of panicked messages.

Lesson learned: get something that tastes decent that you can eat in the room instead of going to hotel and casino banquets for holiday meals. The casino food was expensive and not very good. There was a huge quantity, but there's only so much one person can eat.