Sure, it’s Read Free Sunday (RFS) here at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, June 1
It was busy tonite when we reported for duty at the hotel…The Assistant Front Desk Manager (AFDM) was on the phone, there was someone waiting for him to finish, and when yours truly got to the back office the phone was ringing again.
You have to answer the phone because you never know when someone is going to need 9-1-1…It wasn’t that – it’s only been that a couple of times in decades working a front desk – but it was a scammer…I am not making that up.
He said he was from corporate IT and needed to install some updates…We knew it was a scam immediately…One, we’ve been warned about crap like this…They call and you give them access to your server and then BOOM everything’s mucked up…Two, corporate IT wouldn’t call at 2200 on Friday nite…Something like this would have been scheduled in advance and I would’ve received an email on the matter…Three, the guy’s accent was from the South, not the Indian guy who would’ve called had this been legitimate…So we said we’re very busy right now and to call back during normal business hours.
That was it, tho…The AFDM ended his call and the guest was served and the Sparrow Aura of Calm (SAoC) we all know and love seemed to permeate the hotel.
It lasted for 20 minutes.
We were in the storeroom behind guest laundry getting a pillow for 223 when the fire alarm went off…Not a local alarm, THE fire alarm, the one that not only wakes up the entire goddamn hotel, but guests in neighboring hotels, too.
So we head back to the front desk down the 201-227 wing, and guests, of course, start poking their heads out…(Including the gals in 223, who got their pillow.)…We tell them, truthfully, that we do not know what the problem is, that it is being investigated, and there is no reason to panic…Yet…The alarm shuts off after about 30 seconds and upon return to the front desk the AFDM is in the back office, at the alarm panel, chatting with someone we presume is the AGM…The AFDM then goes to check the boiler rooms and comes back a few minutes later to report they’re all clear…Ol’ Sparrow is only obliged to field two phone calls from guests wondering what the deal is.
The fire department took their sweet time getting here, not arriving until after the AFDM comes back from checking the boiler rooms…The lieutenant wants to be taken to the sprinkler room – someplace not yet checked – so we take him…We know from experience the door is in the workout room and we make entry and you didn’t have to be Mr Damage Control to see what the problem was: water was coming out of a valve connected to the sprinkler system, and at a pretty good rate, too…The lieutenant fearlessly enters the room and starts nosing around and he leans over and whispers something to another fireman and then he turns some valves…Big valves, too, that appear to lead into where the leak is coming from; however, shutting them doesn’t stop the leak; it’s still coming out and at more or less the same pressure, too…We go outside and they’re discussing getting the city down here to shut off water “at the street” which would secure water to the hotel for the whole nite, which would be lousy for business because the whole morning would be spent issuing refunds.
We go back inside, and someone I don’t know has entered the sprinkler room…It turns out to be Andy, the PM maintenance guy I’d never seen before…Shortly thereafter, Brandon shows up, so I go back to the front desk to relieve the AFDM, who has been valiantly standing post the whole time.
(The AFDM manager handled this non-routine situation rather well…He has a reputation – basically earned – of getting flustered whenever there’s a spike in sundry stand sales, but he did his part heroically.)
We have arriving guests, and this poses a problem: Do you check guests into a hotel that might lose water, or do you tell them to go somewhere else???…Well, recall that we also own Hotel B next door, and they have availability, so it was a simple matter to make arrangements with them…As it was, one couple elected to go to Hotel B, while another guy only wanted to “crash” and chose to defer the water matter until morning.
The water stayed on, tho…Both the AGM and Andy came by and reported they were able to stop the leak…The fix was they lowered water pressure at the street, allowing the valves to be screwed down tighter, and this stopped the leak…This will be expensive to repair, but it will cheaper than refunding the entire house because we couldn’t provide guests with water.
This put us way behind schedule…And on end of month (EOM) to boot…We weren’t back from running the audit and walking the hotel until 0245, and impossible time, and the last part of EOM was deferred until after 0700, when Tammy arrived.
Here are the EOM numbers vis-a-vis the battle between the AFDM and the Front Desk Supervisor (FDS)…Recall they both get a $100 allowance for the restaurant/sundry stand and the pitched battle – which they don’t know they’re in – is how close to the $100 mark can they get without going over…Some months they hit a hundred dollars even-Steven, in which case the tiebreaker is seeing whose credit card charge to eliminate the overage was less.
This month it was no contest: The AFDM came in, as usual, right at $100 (with a $13.33 charge for the overage) while the FDS didn’t even bother, checking at $86 and change, choosing to leave $14 of his allowance unused because they do not carry over.
The numbers for the month were good….Revenue was up 50K from May 2023 on 59% occupancy, up from 46%…The ADR (average daily rate; room revenue/rooms rented) was more or less unchanged.
The big news at Morning Coffee Serice (MCS) is twofold: 1) we are out of French vanilla and hazelnut creamers, leaving only half & half…2) someone – there are no suspects – decided to wash four of the coffee air pots…It involves sticking a tablet of some sort in there and filling the pot with hot water…We’ve never seen the point to this…One of the lessons of submarine service is you do NOT wash your coffee mug, and coffee pots are only authorized an occasional lite rinse…Wholesale cleanings with poison are certainly forbidden….As a practical matter, it’s a pain the arse for ol’ Sparrow because poison residue in a pot could result in a guest dying, which could lead to bad online reviews…The standard is to rinse them out twice, but we rinse each pot out three times just to be safe…It’s time-consuming and was a pain in the arse tonite.
There was good strength in the gym tonite…We got the weights in we wanted on every exercise but the tricep close grip bench press, where the final set weight was upped from 50 lbs on each side to 55 lbs.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1030 Saturday until 1830 Saturday…8.0 hours for the day and 53.0 hours for the week, both solid 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.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
