It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, February 20
Yours truly got off three good lines tonight, all possible Line of the Year candidates:
Line #1: When are we going to be single at the same time so we can go on a date and you can find out how boring I really am???
This line was said to Dakota…We used to work at the retailer together and she always been crazy about me for some reason, as usual greeting me with a hug I would have left a Visa number for…She was in the lobby playing with a dog – I think she had an Uber drop-off – and Line #1 came after I’d asked if she was still seeing that one guy and it turned out she was…Her reply was there was no way I could be boring, which shows how little she really knows about me.
Line #2: It’s not the shooter, is it?
This classic came about because it turned out there had been a gunman holed up in a nearby condo…Now, ol’ Sparrow neither knows nor is particularly interested in the details, but it turned one of those evacuated is staying with us at a suh-weet rate of $25, plus tax, and Line #2 immediately followed Assistant Front Desk Manager Q announcing this fact.
Line #3: Do you tell him to his face what you say about him???
We were really busy when I got there, so busy I logged into the left computer because Q was still working on the right one, my usual outpost…This turned out to be useless because the system hasn’t been installed for me on the left computer so I couldn’t help anyone unless they needed deodorant and Q was at the right computer until 2310 and didn’t leave until 2320.
All the while his roommate/chauffeur is there waiting for him…The lobby is clear as they’re heading out, so I mention to the roommate – in that classic Sparrow way – about how Q was 20 minutes late tonight and how Q always curses him when he is so much as 30 seconds late, something that is neither entirely true nor completely false, and it got a laff from the roommate because he’s a pretty funny guy…Q said something or another in denial which was followed by Line #3.
At about 0100 I get a call from a woman who is looking for a room right now…She is the wife of a tow truck driver who had a haul and the haulee needs a room for the night…Sure, we have rooms, two queen beds, $189, plus tax.
He comes in about 20 minutes later and the tow guy unhooks his truck – he’s a working man of some sort, tho I don’t know exactly what he does – and it turns out the guy hit a deer…He was not taking this well, either, pacing and fretting while I checked him in, tho it is not reasonable to believe he’s earned his living driving in this state for any length of time and this is the first deer he’s hit…Heck, regular readers of this crap know ol’ Sparrow’s been hitting deer every hour on the hour for years.
He said he was picked up on 131 down near the Interstate, and there were closer towns than ours to take him to and it is awfully out of his way because he lives an hour or so south of the big city and tomorrow is going to be a pain in the neck for him and I felt bad enuff that I gave him our last box of pizza and an Oreo Klondike with my compliments.
Later, he calls me to advise his microwave isn’t working…I go and sure enuff, the number display is blinking and no buttons are responding to anything and even the old trick of unplugging it isn’t yielding squat…So we go next door to 117 and use that microwave.
The big news is the sundry stand freezer was empty when I reported for duty…Q reported it had stopped working earlier today tho I checked it and it was back to producing freezing cold air, so there was no reason not to restock it.
I’ll tell you what, an empty sundry stand freezer – to a maestro like ol’ Sparrow – could be like a blank canvas would be for Van Gogh or Picasso…But brilliance wasn’t possible because all we had in stock were ice cream, ChocoTacos and Klondike Oreos…Gone were the new items: pizza and those frozen Reeses deals.
For the first time in quite a while, there was a Legion district commander duty to attend to…State Commander Greg was in town to give an award to the next county’s newspaper and Stanko came by and picked me up and there was a modest turnout and afterward, we retired to a nearby bar for lunch, which as it turned out I ended up buying.
Technically…Stanko, of course, is district adjutant and he told Tiffany everything went on one bill and the bill went to him, but since District 14 was the host and I command District 14, lunch was with my compliments.
Josh, the managing editor of the paper, is a lousy newsman tho, because there wasn’t a staff photographer there to record the event, so there won’t be any pics of District Commander Sparrow on the front page of their Sunday paper.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1400 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…7.5 hours for the day and 48.5 hours for the week, the lowest weekly total of the month, a sign of how much of a triumph February has been in the sack…I’ll have to check the Sleep Log Archives (SLA), but we could be on track for a record sleep month. (RSM).
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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