Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Tuesday, February 4
Q’s big turnover item when I reported for duty concerned 248…Seems he reported the power was out in his bathroom, Maintenance was unable to get it back up and he declined Q’s offer of another room, a suite upgrade in fact…Q also said he was still not happy when Q issued him a discount for the night, implying he’d be pestering us for another one.
Good luck getting it…Folks, when you have a problem at a hotel and the hotel offers to solve it for you and you say no, even it involves some minor inconvenience for you, there’s really not much else we can or will do for you…There comes a time when you’ve got to be firm…I’ve had conversions like this before…They ask for something unreasonable or keep whining about the problem and they think we’re supposed to take it…No, I’m sorry, we’re not…Had he come to me with his sniveling I would have smacked him upside the head and told him look, munch breath, we offered to solve your problem and you went martyr on us and said no. What would you like me to do for you?
That last question is key and you ask it from time to time after you’ve done everything you’re prepared to do for a guest…It’s a splendid tactic because it puts the ball in their court and if you force them to actually put their unreasonable demands into words they usually realize what twits they’re being and stop bothering you.
Not for the first time this week, I forgot to put the bell out when I reported for duty and, also not for the first time, I got pissed when someone merely grunted to try and get my attention…It’s actually sort of fun because, of course, I go thru the hilarious motions of retrieving the bell and making them ring it, which makes light of the situation so perhaps they’ll forget they were kept waiting but it also reinforces I was an idiot.
Someone, probably Front Desk Manager Brandon, decided to stop fighting the Christmas music battle and now no music is playing in the lobby at all…Recall Brandon said we were waiting for a CD to be sent, a circumstance I seem to remember from working at the timeshare…Apparently hotel lobby music is shipped via camel over the Aleutian land bridge because they are always taking forever to get here…The unasked question, of course, is where in the hell is the CD we were using before the Christmas CD went in, tho now that I think about we may have been obliged to send it back.
The sundry stand is low on those Oreo Klondike bars, so I was obliged to rearrange them, which made more room for Choco-Tacos…I also rearranged the water sections…We are low on the $3 waters, so I consolidated them, eliminating three rows, and replacing them with the $1 waters, which we have enough on hand to hydrate a Gobi Desert expedition.
The fuss over whether or not the power would go out during the planned outage today in our small town was a bunch of hooey…I called the power company and I would have been better off calling the VA for all the good it did me…The chick meant well but was unable to tell me whether or not The Shire would be affected…Then she said only 14 houses were going to be affected, leading me to surmise one, The Shire wouldn’t be one of them and two, they were only houses on 3rd and 4th streets, between Main Street and the street north of it…It would have been nice if they would’ve said this originally, instead of the outage being “on” four different streets, which seemed to imply all houses on the entirety of the streets would be affected.
So it turns out the indoor propane heater I bought wasn’t needed…I got it at the retailer after work and it was half off, too…I didn’t take it out of the box, tho, and the question remains whether to take it, and the two propane bottles, back for a refund or keep them, a specific against future power outages…This actually hasn’t been a problem in the five years we’ve lived here but you never know…It would be good to have in case it’s needed and it’s a long life and it probably will be needed at some point…If I do keep it I should probably field test it to make sure I know how to use it, a prospect regular readers of this crap know should not be taken for granted.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1530 Tuesday until 2030 Tuesday…5.0 hours for the day and apologies for not having the weekly figure handy…It was tuff falling asleep today…First, I was well rested to begin with…Two, I had some modest activity before reporting for reading duty on the couch and that may have given me a second wind.
First, I washed the dishes…Then I cleaned the cat box and watered the plants…The plants are doing OK under my care…Well, the fern is all but dead…Sorry…But the other plants seem to be hanging in there…What should be green is mostly green and the violets are still mostly violets, too.
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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