Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Monday, February 11
Sandra, the new night auditor, favored us with her presence tonight…She said there was a mixup somewhere or another and she thought she had last night off…She has a couple of night audits with Quentin under her belt, but she still had questions tho, honestly, I didn’t always have answers because the checklist Q drew up has a lot of things that do not pertain to graveyards, they are things he does a back-up to Brandon and I long ago forgot how to do them.
She’s a pretty quick learner and it was a slow night and we were done with Part 1 of our night’s work a bit before 0100 and I told that was about a half-hour longer than it will take her once she’s up and running at full speed.
After five nights of field testing with my uniform shirt untucked, I have decided to tuck it in…It’s a sharper look and while this may sound funny, it’s more comfy, too…I told Brandon this and he took it well…The problem is I’ve worn a lot of uniforms over the years and it is difficult for me to wear one that does not produce the neatest possible appearance and Brandon, in his role as assistant front desk manager, understands people are different and doesn’t try to force his will on anyone.
One thing I noticed is Sandra does not use the marker when folding paper into thirds!!!…As noted, we do no small amount of that here on graveyards and I use a marker to nail down the folds because I was tired of slicing my fingers up….I tried to tell her this but you know how impulsive new night auditors can be and she insisted on folding folios and registration cards with her hands despite my claims that eventually, she will bleed to death.
Got some kudos this morning while I was selling one of the Haliburton crew chiefs a breakfast coupon…He was so moved by his long-term stay here he thanked me for our friendliness and our cleanliness and that he and his crew were really enjoying their stay, as much as you can enjoy your stay while working shift work away from home in the middle of winter…I graciously accepted them on behalf of the management and staff here, adding we hoped they thought of us as their home away from home.
Boy, a lot of women were on the rag tonight at the retailer…Jasmine was whining about her feet…Evidently, she dropped something on three of her toes at her other job and they’ve been spouting blood ever since…Then she was at the service desk preparing to do some go-backs and she pulled out a bin of housewares this falls on her feet, a direct hit on the same three, previously-damaged toes…Supervisor Mary was so concerned about Jasmine she sent me on my break, which was good because Jasmine was really wailing up a storm and I was worried I might actually hear her in the break room in the back of the store.
Susan was whining about Assistant Manager Felicia, who told her she couldn’t keep the crap she’d just bought behind the service desk…This policy was rolled out last week to massive grumbling because a lot of us kept purchases a the service desk because where else are we going to keep the stuff we buy while we’re on the clock???.
Supervisor Mary was fussy because everyone else was fussy, too…Ol’ Sparrow was the only bastion of sensibility out there tonight.
Had the pleasure of serving a family of cheapskates, too…This lady came up with a cart that had three winter jackets in it, all on clearance and she also happened to be wearing one that was identical to one of the three, a pink number she said she bought in the next county for $10…Well, prices had been slashed even further and we were now all but giving them away for $5 and she wanted to know if she could “get my five dollars back”.
Good gravy…I can appreciate five bucks as much as the next person, but you buy something on clearance be happy with that…As a matter of fact, you can’t get your five dollars back…If you had paid full price for it, still had your receipt and it was within two weeks of purchase then yes, we would be happy to refund the difference, but we don’t refund the difference between one clearance price and another and it is not particularly reasonable to expect this.
Then her mother, standing about ten feet away, got wind that her precious, grown-up daughter wasn’t to get her treasured five dollars back and yelped:
I thought you price matched!!!
It was a shriek!!!…I almost cowered and wept…I managed to compose myself enuff to explain well, yes, ma’am, we do in certain circumstances, but not from one clearance price to another and it was all academic anyway because your dumb-dumb daughter didn’t have her receipt anyway, not that it would have done her any good in this case.
Then a guy comes up wondering how he can activate his gift card…It was a Visa deal, tho it had the retailer’s logo on it, which was more confusing than anything else…What little I could do at the register produced zero results so I looked at the card and asked if he had called the 800 number and/or visited the website and he said yes, neither was helpful…This really didn’t make much sense because 800 numbers and websites are designed to be helpful, so I dial the 800 number, but it’s actually an 866 number so I get Waste Management instead of the gift card people…The real number works, tho, but I can’t get a live human, so I whip out my phone and start in on the website…It takes a while, but I get it activated for him, no small matter because there’s $250 on it…The problem was where it asked for the three-digit security code he had, for reasons that were not immediately apparent to me, entered the last four digits of the card number.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Monday until 1530 Monday, a total that does not include hitting the snooze button twice, which ol’ Sparrow doesn’t do too often…I did not want to get out of bed, tho…6.0 hours for the day and 12.5 for the week, very average totals.
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.
Let’s be friends. Follow me on Facebook.
