Friends, today’s Diary of a Nobody is offered with Sparrow’s compliments.
Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, March 27
Boy, more zany guests bothering ol’ Sparrow before he could get down to business this morning…I reported for duty and Mark told me about a guest who’s rugrat left her floatie in the pool area…Well, the pool area had already closed but Mark offered to go and open it for him, of course, but the guy said no, he’ll get it when they checked out in the morning.
Well, he comes by five seconds after Mark leaves, buys three waters and announces he’s the guy whose daughter left the floatie in the pool area…Nice guy…I ring up the waters, not telling him water just as good came out of his bathroom sink, and we go and get the floatie…He’s probably not even 30 and it turns out he has five kids…Crap…I told him I never bothered to reproduce, five kids, especially at a young age, seemed unfathomable…He laffed and said there were no shortage of challenges but he said the rewards were there, too…I told him I was kind of envious because I missed out on those things, a lie because I’ve never thought that…I am content not having kids.
Then a guy comes in, a short Hispanic guy…He had come by earlier looking for a room and Mark had told him we were sold out…Which we were…More or less…Every room was booked, however, Mark canceled a reservation (shorthanded to ‘cxl res’ in the trade) for a guy who had reserved thru an outfit called Company Lodging…They’re a middle man between companies and hotels and their clients are issued a card they use at check-in and we bill the company…Mark canceled the reservation because it was not guaranteed, tho I don’t really think he should have done that…Plus, we’re sold out, so if he does show up we’re screwed…Or, rather, ol’ Sparrow is screwed because he’s the one who’ll have to deal with it.
Pay attention here: the cancellation meant availability had been opened up online and the guy was p*ssed he was able to book online when 20 minutes earlier Mark had told him we were sold out…He wanted the number to customer service…I was gracious…I tapped some buttons to give the impression I was getting to the bottom of things and told him a reservation had just been canceled, opening up a room, which was true enuff…He calmed down, apologized and a couple of minutes later we were BFFs…By great good fortune, the room that had been canceled was the same type he had reserved, and check-in was easy.
Then the working man whose reservation Mark had canceled shows up!!!… I am not making that up…This could have caused real problems but, more great, good fortune, Mark’s pre-shift briefing had been thorough so I knew another guy who had booked thru Priceline had called to say he couldn’t make it.
The only problem was I couldn’t find this guy’s canceled reservation in the system…This was no big deal…I’ll find it eventually and I still had his registration card handy and I knew the room I was putting him in, so I had him sign the registration card and made him a couple of keys…There was no reason to keep him waiting.
Then I went to the back office and got to work…First, I transferred the no-show to a house account, which freed up his room in the system…Then I found the canceled reservation, hit the reinstate button and nothing…I did this a couple of more times but for reasons they thought good the Hotel Gods were not letting me reinstate his booking…So I called tech support and after pressing “2” 120 times and waiting for half-hour someone came on for a solution that took ten seconds…Oh, he said, hit the Add-On button…That will make a copy of the reservation and I followed instructions and BOOM, there was a duplicate reservation to check in.
I gave notice at the retailer today…I didn’t weep – work is work – but I rather enjoy working here for my 18 hours a week…Connie didn’t take it too well tho, saying I will be missed and even curling her lower lip for dramatic effect.
I didn’t get a whole lot of time at the service desk – my assigned station – but early on a guy came by saying his phone was telling him the phone card he’d bought was invalid…Well, heck, I’m hardly your go-to guy on tech support matters like this, but I looked at the card to see what it could tell me and it turned out he bought a card for a basic phone and he has a smartphone…That explains that…He pounds his forehead with a hand for buying the wrong one and he is about to kill himself when I point out the card also says “No Refund”…But wait, I say, we have no shortage of supervisors just dying to appease you, and I’m not even going make you demand to see one of them, either because Daniel, Mary and Maria – all equally spineless – are all on duty and Daniel is the first one I see so I summon him over…He doesn’t even blink, immediately implementing refund procedures for the guy, who pronounced the whole experience “swell”.
After clocking out I immediately headed out to the next county, ostensibly to get some canned coffee and mouthwash at the retailer out there, but out of habit the car pulled into my fave Mexican joint’s driveway, so I had lunch there.
Outside of the retailer there was a girl with a notebook working on a school project who asked if I would violently object to answering one question…I’d be happy to, I said and the question was had I heard of the three, five or ten second rule regarding eating food that had dropped to the floor…I told her the one I’d heard the most over the years is the five-second rule though, if the floor is really dirty, three seconds could well be in order…Ten seconds, I told her, and heck, you might as well just eat the whole meal off the floor.
The canned donut shop knockoff coffee is still two bucks cheaper than the sack of coffee, despite having only 1.5 ounces less…That’s in real dollars…In Sparrow Math Dollars it’s actually a $5 savings because $8 rounds up to $10 while $6 is all but $5, hence a $5 savings…I was going to ask about the difference, it is rather large for such a small size difference, but I didn’t want to tip them off and then have the price increased next time.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: Per protocol, there wasn’t any sleep to report Wednesday.
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.
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