Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Sunday, June 17
We are really shorthanded…At both hotels…So shorthanded that when Kathy came in to relieve me at 0700 I asked if I would be relieving her at Hotel B (as I normally do Sunday nights) in just 16 short hours and she wearily nodded yes, she would be.
And Kathy is leaving in a week!!!…I don’t know what in the hell we are going to do then…Taylor, the new guy, seems dependable and stuff, but he’s hired for Hotel A and until he is trained it is just GM Amy and the other new guy Quentin to cover 14 morning and afternoon shifts every week…I have no clue what is going on at Hotel B.
About 0130 I get a call from a woman looking for a room…By chance, we have one…I don’t know how this happened, the whole town is sold out, but I told her yes, we have a room with one king bed ready, that the price gougers at the HQ insist I ask $259 for it but that I was pricing it to move at only $199…If she got the impression this rate slashing would probably cost me my job, well, I have no control over that.
She paused and I knew I didn’t have a sale…Oh, I need two queen beds she said and then another pause, her tone indicating it was my responsibility to produce a room with two queen beds…You run into this all the time in this business: people expecting you have the magic fairy dust that can solve all their problems, especially in the middle of the night.
(You ran into this from time to time working security in Vegas responding to medical calls…Dude, I’m a security officer with some first aid training, not Dr Kildare…I can, perhaps, keep her alive, but we called paramedics…Stop yelling at me.)
It was a little better at Hotel A tonight, breakfast-wise…I had the code to the now-vacant GM’s apartment and everything from food to serving implements was back there…The apartment is a rat hole, even by my standards…I’m not sure whose stuff is in there, probably Kathy and Mike’s, but not only is it a mess, there’s some sort of odor I was not completely prepared to declare enchanting…I don’t know…It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t have me closing my eyes dreaming off far off wonders, either….The only problem was I neglected to check if bagels and muffins had been pulled…As it turned out, they hadn’t, so all I was able to do was pull them so they could thaw in time for tomorrow.
I woke up this afternoon feeling out of sorts…The Wife is still off in the big city for the retailer and the house is a mess, approaching even my threshold of Mess Tolerance…So I washed the dishes and did some laundry, to include folding the clothes that had been sitting in the dryer all week, and then I completely lost my mind and vacuumed the kitchen rug and threw out the cat litter and replaced it with fresh stuff…Our cabin still wouldn’t be issued the Good Housekeeping Seal, but it’s OK…More or less.
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I’ve already started getting ready for next week’s Legion state convention…It’s about an hour south of the big city, in the same place it was last year, which is good because this hotel puts on a pretty good show…The only problem is it is a pretty big place and if you’re not careful you can get lost, like I did last year…I went and parked in the right place and went in the correct door but after that things went south, and I ended up in the executive offices and ultimately used a house phone to call the front desk and beg for help…They took pity on me and sent somebody up to help me.
There isn’t a dress code for these things, but there is a long history of getting dressed up for state conventions and I usually wear a suit, tho sometimes I will wear khakis and a polo shirt, which no one can really complain about…I’ve already got the navy and the olive suits out, and some khakis and polo shirts because if I leave stuff like this for the last minute I’ll forget something.
I have to be there by Thursday morning, too, so I have to hit the road bright and early…As district commander, I was asked to help judge the first ever color guard competition…I don’t know what special insights being DC gives me, but I told Annette, the district commander coordinating this, that I have lots of sports officiating experience, so I shouldn’t completely embarrass anyone.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Sunday until 1430 Sunday…1430 is an hour before the alarm was scheduled to go off, because I have the retailer at 1800…I don’t know why I woke up…I didn’t have to use the can, always the lead suspect in these matters…Well, yeah I did…Ol’ Sparrow is never too far away from having to use the can, of course, but I woke up like a bolt and I am not sure why…Could have been some thunder, I suppose, because there was some weather today, but who knows???
I am not entirely certain how this happened, but I neglected to report the weekly totals yesterday: 41.5 hours, a low total but it’s the highest of the month so far which, of course, is bad news for the monthly totals coming at the end of the month.
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th century British novel of the same name.
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