Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, January 11
It’s performance review time at the hotel and Q plopped down in his usual chair in the lobby to let it be known that while his evaluation was very good his raise was not…He said it was a token raise and he was not pleased with it at all…Regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall Q actually left the hotel last summer to work overnights at a very luxury condo/timeshare deal on the mountain and it fell thru when it turned out the position demanded a driver’s license that Q has never bothered to get…He said he’s making a couple-three bucks less an hour here than he was there.
Well, you know, I told him, us working stiffs have to look out for ourselves because no one is going to do it for us and he seemed intrigued when I told him I turned down the hotel’s initial offer to go from part-time to full-time and held out for the premium wage I make now but otherwise Q didn’t commit to anything drastic.
Here’s my review of my performance as hotel night auditor: I show up every night…On time, too…Kudos to Sparrow.
Assistant Front Desk Manager Devani was there when I reported for duty and she was sorting out and stapling together some new night audit checklists…I don’t know why either…No one uses checklists here…They used to, but the habit was intermittent when I started 14 months ago and has all but disappeared…Sometimes there will be one from swing shift when I start but it’s just left on the front desk and I end up shredding it and in the morning Tammy never bothers to get one out…Still tho, there they were, a fresh stack of night audit checklists in the Night Audit Checklist folder in the drawer and I would hate to have Devani or Front Desk Manager Brandon fretting over why the stack wasn’t getting any smaller, so I took one out and shredded it.
Very slow for ski season and there over 30 rooms for me to sell when I came on…Devani, in her role as my immediate supervisor, joked my mandate was to sell out tonight or else, which was funny because there wasn’t any walk-up traffic or phone calls at all which was a pity because ol’ Sparrow was poised to really slash rates tonight.
The latest gas mileage figures for the new ride is an estimate: 31.631 MPG…Recall Thursday I tried to fill up they didn’t have the preferred 87 octane so I put a few bucks of 89 in…It’s an estimate because while I didn’t adjust the trip odometer I forgot to note exactly how many gallons I’d put in…Two something…So I factored in 2.5 gallons, which can’t be too far off, and the 31.631 is in line with what we’ve been getting, so I’m confident it’s a reasonably accurate figure.
I was obliged to move some snow today…Four inches, most of it leftover from the dumping a couple of days ago and I got the snowblower out for it…The only fly in the ointment was the chute that directs the snow wouldn’t move so it only blew it straight ahead…This obliged ol’ Sparrow to only go the width of the driveway instead of the length so snow wouldn’t end up in the street – a violation of the town’s municipal code – or in the carport…I could have left it, I suppose, but more snow was expected while I slept and while we weren’t expecting Blizzard of the Year, I’ve learned it’s best not to let it pile up.
The big news is it was cold enuff that the pipes froze!!!…I am not making that up…Actually, per policy here at The Shire, only the cold water tap in the kitchen froze…I should have thought of that, of course, but it was a simple matter to open the cabinet beneath the sink, put a space heater there and turn it on and it was back to normal after I woke up.
The Wife reported her sister is touch and go and they’re not taking it day to day, they’re taking it ten minutes to ten minutes…I told her that was better than having a priest on station to say a few choice Latin words and that today it’s every ten minutes and tomorrow maybe it will be every 15 minutes.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Saturday until 1830 Saturday…8.5 hours for the day and a lousy 43.5 hours for the week, which we’re blaming on Monday’s four-hour session.
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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