Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Tuesday, January 14
Had a phone call from someone at about 0113 who asked a question I can’t remember fielding before…It was a younger woman who was wondering if she did make a reservation that had breakfast included, could she still buy the breakfast coupon when she arrived.
A logical enuff question when you think about it…Some of our rates do include the breakfast coupon…It costs $10 and has a $20 value in our restaurant, not too bad a deal…Well, of course, you can purchase it when you get here…In fact, I told her in a conspiratorial tone, it’s better if you buy it at the front desk because if you include it with your reservation it’s merely tacked on to your room rate and you have pay tax on it…So you save 15 cents or so, which made her laff.
A bit later a kid checked in…He didn’t have a reservation but he got lucky: we had rooms and I was in the mood to cut him a deal: $139, plus tax…He was a tall, friendly sort with mussed-up hair and an acne-scarred face who probably wasn’t valedictorian and he wasted no time in telling me he was a rodeo cowboy who was home only about three or four nights a month and on the road the rest of the time and he was really tired and wanted to stop for the night even tho his ID said he lived in the next county which isn’t that far for Pete’s sake and he’s broken every bone in his body many times and was currently recovering from a shoulder injury which followed an ankle injury and good gravy, he talked thru the entire transaction.
Then I got a call from a younger woman who was looking to scam a deal…She asked for rates for this weekend and she noted a couple of things: 1) she had scoped out deals for $150 online and 2) she would be in town for a seminar and wondered if the seminar rate was less than that…Both were lies, of course…No online rate for a weekend in ski season would be $150…At least not here…Maybe in Phoenix where there’s no snow you could get a $150 weekend rate during ski season, but not here…Two, no one holds a seminar on a weekend anywhere…Not in Tucumcari, New Mexico and certainly not here…Still tho, I forged ahead and looked up rates for this weekend.
– Ma’am, I can do a room with two queen beds for $304.99 plus tax…
Silence.
– Uh, what’s the seminar rate?
– What’s the name of the seminar, ma’am?
Nothing…I could hear some background noise and some muffled voices but that was it and eventually she hung up.
About 0430 an older gentleman came up in his bathrobe looking for some coffee…Well, usually I have coffee out early but not this morning, but I had some that I had made for myself and he was grateful for that…Seems they don’t like the K-machine in their room…He was in town for spinal fusion surgery at the local hospital which I found interesting because while the local hospital is hardly considered an abattoir you never see it mentioned in the same breath as the Mayo Clinic, either…In fact, the hospital in the next county generally gets higher marks.
A story: the only real experience I’ve had there showed them brimming with incompetence…It was years ago and I was there to give a friend of The Wife’s a lift home after some outpatient surgery…I go pick her up and we’re sitting on a bench at the pharmacy at the retailer when I get a phone call…It’s the nurse from the hospital and good thing she made me give her my number because she was wondering if, by chance, the IV had been left in Michelle’s arm…I actually laughed out loud:
– You’re kidding, right???
– No…I’m not…If you could please check.
Michelle was still sedated and not completely coherent, but she dutifully takes off her jacket and rolls up a sleeve and bingo, there it is.
– Uh, yeah, it’s here.
– DON’T TOUCH IT!!!…Come back here and I’ll meet you out front and remove it.
– OK…Look, is there anything else we should be on the lookout for???…Thermometers, sponges, scalpels…Anything???
The nurse didn’t find that half as funny as it really was, but she did meet us outside and did a field removal and Michelle didn’t even have to get out of the car.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1000 Tuesday until 1830 Tuesday…8.5 hours for the day and a man-sized 26 hours for the week…In fact, it’s such an impressive total I went back and checked the sleep log and it is the highest Tuesday Total (TT) since at leat July, 2018 and it’s not particularly close, either.
Longtime readers of the crap know you don’t count your chickens before they hatch in the sleep racket, especially when you keep the odd hours we do, but the first 50-hour sleep week of 2020 could be in the cards.
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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