Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Tuesday, June 5
I was relieved 40 minutes late at Hotel B this morning…In fact, I wasn’t even relieved by Jess, but by GM Adam who wandered in about 0740…Like me, he wondered what the deal was and I told him I didn’t know, I am relieved late regularly and I am pretty used to it.
Used to it, but hardly pleased with it…Get to work on time…It’s not that hard…I can count the times I’ve been late on one hand in 30 years of working…Heck, not only am I on time, I am always early nowadays and am so conscientious I once called when I was in danger of only being on time…And this was not the only thing that annoyed this morning at Hotel B…About 0700 the guest in 201 comes up whining about how he left his key in his room…(He’s a shift worker and was returning from work, I think at a hotel remodel on the mountain.)…He leaves his key in his room regularly so this wasn’t a bulletin, but before he stopped by the front desk he had sashayed through the breakfast room and he addressed me with his mouth full of food…Good gravy, this is disgusting…I wanted to smack him because this was something Ma Sparrow reinforced constantly:
Do not open your mouth if you have food in it!!!
This is all-inclusive, too…My brother and I were not to open our mouths to speak, to chew and certainly not to stuff more food in it and double certainly not to request another goddamned key to our hotel room…The key making process is not instantaneous here (it’s quicker at Hotel A, frankly) and I was treated to his chewing display for a good 60 seconds.
I’m at the retailer tonight finishing something or another at the service desk when Buzz – who likes to make fun of the “speeches” I make for closing pages and whose own pages suck – came to use the phone to page for help in Electronics…It had all the warmth of a DI barking orders to his recruits…I stood there crossly with my hands on my hips and when he was done announced I do the pages here, which made him laff, which it should have because it was pretty funny…Then he referenced my “speeches” and how the customer probably wanted service before we closed in three hours, which was also pretty funny.
I got messed with twice doing closing pages…The first time – the 2115 page – was fouled up by my buddy Cory…From the phone at the service desk I was facing Ladies Apparel and you see Cody a lot there because he is dragged there daily by his wife and daughters…Anyway, he saw me and started waving both arms and picking his nose and other mature things, all designed to fluster my 45-minutes-to-closing page, the first one of the evening….It actually worked somewhat as parts of it sounded like amateur hour, but I gave him the finger then turned around to ignore him and finished strong.
Then my coworker Sergio messed with me…The 2130 page was done from the Garden Center phone because I nearby doing go-backs in Hardware…Sergio was nearby in the pharmacy stocking stuff and you should know doing pages from the Garden Center phone is a challenge because there is a speaker immediately above you…For the uninitiated, hearing yourself doing a page can be confusing.
You would think Sergio, my co-worker, would appreciate a proper closing page, in the spirit of superior customer service, but you would wrong…He acted like a dork, too, yapping through my entire page…It was loud enough to hear but not really understand so your instinct is to listen harder which just screws you up more and combined with hearing yourself over the loudspeaker, our customers still hadn’t had a decent closing page.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Tuesday until 1530 Tuesday…Officially, six hours, but I got up about 1200 to use the can and didn’t immediately get back to sleep, and while the integrity of the Sleep Log is important it is not rocket science and I am not going to bother factoring this in the daily total.
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.
Read Gaylon’s latest: We The People: Making America America Again at www.GaylonKent.com
