Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, April 20
Debuted my new shirt for working at the retailer today…You have to wear either a navy or a white top and I usually wear a navy Under Armour dri-fit shirt I’ve had for at least ten years…Connie the personnel manager whines about it because it’s a pretty dark navy blue but I went above her head last year to Carrie the Store Manager…I compared the shirt to a black shirt and Carrie could see it was navy and gave me dispensation to wear it…Anyway, I grew tired of wearing my own shirt at the retailer so I bought a house brand dri-fit polo in a shade of navy Connie will adore…It cost $10, which is about what I want to spend for a work shirt for the retailer…It’s OK quality…Like other retailer house brand clothes, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it off work…It won’t last close to ten years, of course, and it will probably start falling apart in late summer.
Sir Thomas called off his shift as service desk supervisor today, leaving Daniel as the only supervisor for the morning and part of the afternoon…Daniel said Sir Thomas had said he was taking a mental health day, no doubt to recover from his day off Thursday and to better prepare for his day off Saturday, giving him a three-dayer…We gave Thomas shit all day despite the fact he wasn’t there to hear it and we agreed the next time we were at the service desk with Sir Thomas we’d mention mental health from time to time, though not specifically referencing his mental health call off…I also told Daniel that when I was his age and you tried to call off with mental health day as your excuse your boss was likely to make a fist and say “I’ve got your mental health day…”
Calling off here is pretty easy, actually and is a misnomer to boot because you don’t actually call anybody…You can do it all online so you never have to talk to a disgruntled supervisor.
Had two dolts come to my register back to back this afternoon…Good gravy, each had me worrying about the future of the human race and hoping against hope they would never reproduce.
The first guy had a fan he wanted to return…OK…He didn’t have the receipt and asked if he could get store credit for it…Sure, I said…In theory, we don’t take returns without a receipt but in practice we usually do…Actually, he has a second fan with him that he wants to exchange the old one for and I process this transaction, announce the new fan is less than the first one and he is entitled to a $6.30 refund, on the gift card he specified…He gets snitty and says he doesn’t want this and this is where I started getting confused and he got annoying…He said he didn’t want the gift card…He wanted, well, I don’t really remember what he wanted…I told him the transaction was already processed so I gave him the gift card…Then he started speaking in tongues trying to explain what he had really wanted…He asked, in a reasonable tone, if I understood this and I said of course not and stood there dumbly with my mouth open…I really had no clue what he had wanted to do…It was as if he had been talking about how the Federal Reserve operates…I still had some zero idea and he advised me it wasn’t that hard I apologized for not being smart enough for him…In the end, I game him a cash refund for the second fan so he could go and buy it again at another register, paying for it, in part, with the gift card he didn’t wanted in the first place.
Right after him another wizard sashays up…He wants to send money…OK, where I ask?…Jamaica…No, wait…He consults his phone…Mississippi…That’s OK, too…We can wire money pretty much everywhere, even the Deep South…I ask him for his phone number…He gives it to me and it turns out he is not in the system…He insists he is, he practically sends money here every hour on the hour…I assure him he isn’t and it isn’t that big a deal…He isn’t happy…Then I ask him how much money he wants to send…He says “five hundred and something…”…I am not making that up!!!…He declared he wanted to send five hundred and something dollars!!!
Christ, I thought…Should I tell him he has to be more specific???…Should I fill it in myself???…For the second time in three minutes there I stood with my mouth open looking like an idiot, completely confused…In the end, I said well, you know, feel free to narrow that down for me…So he consults his phone for literally three or four minutes and then announces he is sending $804, a pretty specific figure, to Mississippi…Very well…Then I issue him a slip of paper and ask him to write the name of the recipient…He screws this up, misspelling the name…I know this because he is on the phone with the recipient and the spelling does not match the pronunciation…The name is not common, either, so the spelling could be anything…I ask him to double check and he writes another letter in there and he put it in the wrong place!!!…There is no way any name in any language in any place – even Mississippi – is spelled like this…It looks like something out of the Cyrillic Bible and right now I am ready to go and deliver the money to Mississippi myself and ultimately, I ask him, nicely, to write out the full name once more, on a fresh slip of paper…He does this and I manage to complete the transaction without having a stroke.
One of life’s great tragedies occurred tonight: somebody had pizza for me at work and I was not hungry!!!…Here’s what happened…I reported for duty at Hotel A at 9pm…We are very shorthanded and Nicole had scammed her first night off since she started and Becky was working a double and would be relieving me in the morning and I like to be helpful…I had clocked out of the retailer at 8pm then visited The Wife where she’s house sitting…She had dinner ready for me, some ravioli that was really good, so I had just eaten…For lunch at the retailer I had bought a package of frozen burritos and didn’t have just one so ol’ Sparrow was pretty stuffed when he got to the hotel…Becky noted she had pizza and made inquiries into my interest into consuming same and I said no, thank you, but right then her daughter Kathy came out – remember, they live in the apartment behind the front desk – and placed the box in front of me, leaving no choice…I told her I wasn’t all that hungry, even for me, and made no guarantees I would eat it.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1am Friday morning until 7am Friday morning…What’s funny was how my dream started to peter out as I started to wake up…I was in a room with some people I didn’t know and I forget what was going on but the dream was proceeding apace until I started to wake up, then we started doing less and less until the very end, right before I woke up, when we weren’t doing anything except farting around waiting for ol’ Sparrow to wake up.
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.
