Read Free Sunday (RFS) rolls on at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, January 7
There were only two changes from the new owners after our nights off when we reported for duty at the hotel…One, the door to the server room – which also serves as the storeroom and where we hang our uniforms – was closed and locked…The new girl Gina was there and she said yeah, they did that yesterday and pointed to one of those small, single-key storage boxes on the wall next to the door…Exactly why the server room is being closed now after years of it being kept open isn’t clear, but it’s their server room…The other change was merely some names added to the distribution lists of the reports we send out every morning.
Recall Gina has a side business cleaning houses, and we asked her for her phone number so we could set up an appointment, but she said she won’t be up and running for a couple of months…This was tragic news because right now we’re hell-bent on getting the house cleaned – deep cleaned, no less – and regular readers of this crap know this is a feeling that may very well pass.
There was a change to the right cash drawer, tho we highly doubt it was mandated by the new owners…The change involves where rolled coins are kept: usually they’re kept in the far left currency tray, which is generally unused…Tonite, tho, some financial genius put them up front, in two spare trays immediately to the right of where the coins are kept…We looked at it – not crossly with our hands on our hips, but with some curiosity – and couldn’t decide if it was idiocy or genius.
Now that we think about it, Gina might’ve done it…She’s already shaking things up by leaving her tube of lotion at the front desk – plainly a quality brand because it has a picture of the Norwegian flag on it, the same brand ol’ Sparrow uses – so maybe she’s going rogue on the stowing of rolled coins in her cash drawer.
Ol’ Sparrow set a personal best tonite for the highest rate quoted to a walk-in…It was about 0100 and this hapless oaf waddles in needing a place to sleep on a cold, snowy, winter’s nite and we were as cold as a witch’s tit, as we used to say in the Nav…It’s ski season in Ski Town, USA, after all, and rooms are priced accordingly and we quoted him $400, plus tax, which was actually a hundred dollars less than The System was asking…He said he would go outside and talk it over with his buddies – who also need a place to sleep tonite – but almost immediately you could see the truck start pulling out, which we took as a “no”.
We almost needed a breather after that one: our first $400 walk-in quote and we thought back on how far we’ve come over the decades in the front desk racket: from $29 slow season rates on the Sin City Strip to $400 in-season in a ski area.
This will surprise you, but there was more snow to move at The Shire when we got home…The good news – everything is relative here – is the ice pick wasn’t needed, tho there was the obligatory shoveling of the berm.
The big news is we moved the snow off the carport’s roof, too, a sign of how just how much snow we’ve gotten this season, as this is only the fourth time we’ve been obliged to move snow off the carport roof in the seven years we’ve owned The Shire…And when we’ve had to it’s always in late February or March.
We dove in in good spirits but Christ, this is one big pain in the arse…We have the proper implement for moving snow off of a roof but the yard has three feet of snow in it and it’s a pain in the arse to maneuver in.
We had help, tho…In a stroke of luck, a kid named Daniel was walking thru the alley – probably on his way to the weed store which was opening soon – took pity on ol’ Sparrow, and asked if we wanted some help…After thinking about it for a few seconds we decided we did, and he came and took over for us…God bless this kid, because we were as tired as we usually are on Saturday mornings and the only reason we were moving snow off the goddamned carport roof was to keep the roof from caving in, which would be an even bigger pain the keister…His labors complete, Daniel asked if he could sit near the tree that’s in front of the yard, which would provide easy access to the weed store and we said sure.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1030 Saturday until 2130 Sunday…11.0 hours for the day and 54.5 hours for the week, both wonderful totals.
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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.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
