Read Free Fortnight rolls on.
Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Sunday, January 17
Assistant Front Desk Manager Q had a tasty tidbit for me when I reported for duty at the hotel: the broad in 108 was questioned by the police for credit card fraud.
I actually dealt with her last night when she came by to get a key for her room because she was not bright enuff to take it with her when she’d left…Q reported she’s here for work for an unspecified job she found on Craigslist and her room was reserved by her employer and was secured via a credit card authorization form, which is pretty standard…We send you a form and you fill it out and send it back with a copy of your ID and the front and back of the credit card…The credit card was authorized at check-in and everything was in order until the real cardholder called wondering why there were charges from a hotel he wasn’t even staying at.
A reasonable enuff question, reasonable enuff to get the constables involved…Q reported the guest said she had some zero clue about the matter, that she hadn’t even met the guy, and eventually the police believed her because she was let go…It’s still not entirely certain how we got taken, tho…Perhaps we didn’t get a copy of either the ID or the card…A cursory, on-the-spot investigation of the Credit Card Authorization binder yielded nothing, but I didn’t really care and wasn’t in full Joe Friday mode so I didn’t bother with it anymore.
A bit after midnight there’s a commotion at the front desk and I hear someone weeping…Well, this will get even yours truly out of his chair and I head out and there’s a pretty girl about 30 or so, standing with her head in her arms, which are folded on the front desk.
Detective Sparrow starts in asking what the deal is and it’s tuff getting anything useful out of her because not only is she weeping all she can say is “I just want to sleep.” which does a good job of telling me what she wants but otherwise isn’t particularly useful…Then you can start smelling the booze and she continues announcing all she wants to do is sleep and I ask if she needs the police or an ambulance and she shakes her head, repeating all she wants to do is sleep…I tell her this will be easier if I know if she’s staying here or not.
She says she does not have an ID, which I don’t altogether believe because who goes out drinking without one, but she does tell me the last name on the room and it’s an unusual name starting with a J and ending with a Z and she can spell it and knows the city on the reservation so either she belongs in the room or has gone thru an awful lot of work to make it appear she does. So I make her a key but there’s no way she can get to her room so I escort her and when we’re in the area she walks right to the proper door and I open it for her because the key is too confusing and there are a couple of other girls in there who don’t violently object when she enters and, in fact, seemed relieved to see her.
One heck of a workout this morning…Yours truly was moderately concerned because I didn’t have a lot of calories at the hotel, a kombucha, my usual vegetable allotment and a sack of peas, so perhaps strength wouldn’t be all that great but it was…The upped weight on the cable shoulder press was done ten times and the bench press was moved ten times, too, and had I bothered I might have come close to eleven.
No Sunday Yapper in the heart spring today…Too bad because it would have been nice to hear what was on his mind – cars he’s driven, his zany nephews, the CIA, who ever knows with him? – but there were others there to bore me and soon enuff I fled to the solitude of my fave, out-of-the-way pool.
I got home, fed the cat and immediately settled in for a long reading session…The current book is about the first settlers in the Northwest Territories – what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and a small part of Minnesota – and like when I read a couple of Lewis and Clark books a few years back, ol’ Sparrow found himself wondering how he would have fared in these situations.
The answer: not good, unless there was a need for a sniveling no-load who likes to get his rest…There generally isn’t on expeditions like this and ol’ Sparrow probably would have been abandoned – or shot – on the journey out, provided he was allowed to come in the first place.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1300 Sunday until 2130 Sunday…8.5 hours for the day, a wonderful start to the sleep week.
Any fears about not being able to sleep after having taken the pre-workout supplement and having lifted have proven to be for naught and 1300 is a bit earlier than I was actually expecting to get to bed.
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.
It was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
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