Yay for Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, April 23
Amy was outside smoking with a guest whose name turned out to be Sabrina when yours truly reported for duty…Some (brief tho too long) conversation revealed Sabrina was a distressed passenger, tho the exact circumstances were not entirely clear…Amy noted she was going to give Sabrina a lift downtown to hotel as I’d clocked in.
That proved to be a fiasco…We clock in on an app on our phones and I have thumbprint login set up but my password had expired and a new one was required…Christ…I haven’t used the password since the account was set up and was unable to produce it…Fortunately, correct answers to my security questions allowed me enter a new one.
Sabrina later showed up to buy things from the sundry stand…She was clearly itching to tell me every detail of why she was a distressed passenger but she has the air of someone for whom busyness and hassles were constant companions and yours truly didn’t have all nite and the less known about her the better so I didn’t take the bait and ask…As it was, the total was $8.50 and her card was declined…Her card was also declined when I later had the nerve to bill her room and tax charges…Some research showed her card had not been authorized at check-in tho those of you keeping score at home might be wondering exactly why a distressed passenger was required to leave a credit card in the first place; the airline will be paying for their stay and still more research showed each distressed passenger room had a voucher attached to the registration card, something ol’ Sparrow should’ve had a clue about immediately.
The cash drawers were a mess…The right drawer and six pennies in the penny tray and was $4.96 over and the left drawer had 18 pennies and was $21.13 over, an imbroglio that is rare even by Amy’s usual standards…The solution was to put some pennies in each tray to even the pennies out but our usual supply of pennies in a back-office drawer had been depleted because Tammy had put them all in her granddaughter’s new Easter piggy bank when her daughter Brook brought the kid to work last week and I gotta be honest, I forget how the matter was sorted out.
Something we’ve noted here before is that you spend enuff time serving enuff people and you are sometimes rewarded with immediate insights into people…This happened (again) tonite when ol’ Sparrow knew – knew! – this broad on the phone would be cheap and tedious even before she asked if we did “price match”…The very core of my being hated her after that and when I quoted her $119, plus tax, for a midweek stay next month she said she could a room cheaper (probably 50 cents or a dollar) online and wondered if I could do better…Well, regular readers of this crap know I could give the room away if I wanted to, but they also know that if you annoy me it’s on, so I lied and told her yours truly had zero flexibility in the matter, about as true as if I’d declared I was Zeus.
Late in the shift, the guy who was working on some flooring in the far wing came up to buy a couple of things from the sundry stand…I noticed him when I’d walked the hotel earlier and declined to favor him with a visit and because he’d been on his knees bending over and all I’d seen of him was his arse I didn’t immediately recognize him…His dirty hands gave him away, tho, and ol’ Sparrow said howdy and was immediately rewarded with the lowdown on the project: how it was basically done, but not completely, and I got more details than would interested anyone except the project manager…So I showed him a palm, apologized, and said dude, I’m not your go-to guy on cleaning and other project specs and advised him to talk to Luke the Maintenance Guy or GM Andy about it…He laffed and said that wasn’t unreasonable.
Recall last week, or maybe it was a couple of weeks ago, Tammy had a pretty funny line one morning when it was snowing and she noted that ol’ Sparrow had recently changed out the snow tires on the new ride…It had been pretty nice the past few days, tho it was a lousy time to have your snow tires off…Tammy’s line was “so you was your summer???” which is really funny because it implied that winter was beginning again and then a nite or two later I paraphrased it and used a similar line on Mark which turned out not to be as funny as Tammy’s original which happens sometimes in the Front Desk Comedy Racket (FDCR) but then today – mirabile dictu – ol’ Sparrow was able to use the line, in its original phrasing, on Tammy he is not making that up.
What happened was it is still winter up here and several inches of snow fell overnite…Tammy noted this as she walked in the door and said the roads were all slush and yours truly said – with Classic Sparrow Timing (CST):
So how was your summer???
Nothing…It was as if I’d farted…Sigh…This happens sometimes in the FDCR.
Let me tell you something, slush is the worst to drive in…You have to take care in the snow, of course, and ice is hardly anyone’s preferred condition, but slush is really the most dangerous…Even with snow tires because once you get into a rut of slush you are going exactly where it wants to take you and good luck getting out of it.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…12.5 hours for the day and 52.5 for the week, yet another 50-hours sleep week for ol’ Sparrow.
I was up about 1730 and feeling pretty good, actually, and briefly considered getting up and enjoying a proper morning routine but with a 50-hour sleep week there for the taking, a patented Sparrow Roll Over (SRO) was executed and BOOM the next thing anyone knows the alarm is going off.
———
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.