Si, amigos, se lee gratis el Domingo (RFS) en El Diario.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, January 13
Whew, busy tonite at the hotel, with ol’ Sparrow busting hump all nite…This goes against everything we stand for, of course, but we spend enuff time not busting hump here that you really can’t whine about it, altho that certainly doesn’t stop us from doing so.
There were a good number of arrivals – including an airline crew that never showed – but some were already in-house, they merely hadn’t been checked into The System…No, like you, we have some zero clue how this happens…I mean, you’ve accessed the reservation in The System…You’ve printed another registration card, but for whatever reason you don’t actually hit the check-in button.
The key machine is your warning system here, because when you go to make keys it tells you there are already active keys for this room, so you go and check and BOOM, there’s a signed registration card in the bucket…This happened three or four times.
It’s a holiday weekend and we’ve had and are getting some good snow so it’s hardly the Upset of the Year to find we’re sold out all weekend and the Assistant Front Desk Manager (AFDM) said our sold-out bonus will be about $50 or so for tonite, maybe a little less…And of course, there were no shortage of people needing rooms…The weather here wasn’t too bad, but everywhere else in the state it was lousy and some people simply wanted to “get off the road”…Later, the pass would close and several arrivals were unable to make it…The matter of refunds was referred to day shift.
Around midnite a couple of guys came in, hungry and in no mood to have some halfwit desk clerk tell them he didn’t have anything to eat…Fortunately, we had some pizzas and not only did they take the three in the sundry stand freezer (SSF), but they asked if we had any more in the back and they cleaned those out, too…Then the two started discussing the matter:
Guy 1: That’s a lot of pizza…Five boxes…
A pause while he multiplied five times two.
Guy 1: …ten pieces…
The other guy nods and makes a don’t worry gesture with a hand.
Guy 2: Yeah, yeah, don’t worry…We’ll eat it all.
Guy 1: We will???
He sounded skeptical…Then, a rather sensible sort, he picks up a box, plainly looking for directions.
Guy 1: How long do you microwave these for?
Well, we have some experience here and told him 90 seconds per pizza should serve them well…Guy 1 – ever practical – fretted that it would take “effing forever” to heat them all up, but otherwise seemed content to have provisions for the nite.
Then, with Movie of the Week timing, the alarm in the server room went off…Or so we thought…We’re so old and discombobulated now we were unable to recognize the alarm for the phone printer going off…(It was Tammy who would later tell us.)
So we dove in as if we were at NORAD and the missiles were incoming…Now, this wasn’t the EVACUATE NOW alarm that goes off in rooms and sounds like the world is about to end, but the constant tone in the back office’s server room, the same alarm panel that we’ve had no training on, despite the fact we’ve requested it.
So we go check the alarm panel and press the required buttons, but we can’t make heads or tails over what alarm is going off, hardly a bulletin because one isn’t…This really isn’t that big a deal, tho, and long-time readers of this crap know there is something harmless somewhere that sets the alarm off from time to time and we figured this is what is happening here.
But we’re not paid to figure, we’re the only ones here and are paid to put some effort into finding out so – brilliantly continuing this charade – we walk the hotel, checking offices and storerooms and what not and we can’t find anything out of the ordinary because, of course, nothing is…So we get back and call the alarm company, not so much for the alarm itself but because we can’t silence the bugger because, of course, we’re working the wrong alarm.
The guy wasn’t much help…He tried to be, Lord knows, but the problem was the gibberish on the panel meant nothing to him and headquarters wasn’t getting any readings at all from our system, probably because there wasn’t an alarm going off…We’re such idiots…He asks if we want him to call the on-call guy (OCG) and at first we say no, but then we say yes, but the OCG never does call us…Meekly we asked Tammy not to tell anyone we got the real alarm and the PBX alarm mixed up and she laffed and said of course not.
No workout tonite…It’s time for a break…We have Monday off from the veterans service office and we are looking forward to a nice stretch of doing nothing except reading.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Saturday until 1730 Saturday…8.0 hours for the day and 53.5 hours for the week, a satisfactory week in the sack.
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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!
