Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, January 22
One of the lessons I’ve tried to impart here is some humility doesn’t hurt when you walk into a hotel lobby looking for a room…Especially when it’s oh-dark-thirty and cold out…Now, I don’t require outright contrition and you can feel free to look me in the eye, but don’t come prancing in as if you are doing me a favor…While mindful that occupancy is down a tad from this time last year, revenue is up and I’m getting paid whether you stay here or not.
I didn’t like these to whackjobs from the start…The first guy said they needed a room with his tag-team partner immediately yodeling the room would only be used “for five hours”…This is a fairly common tactic, pointing out how little time the room would be used for, and regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall that this is a marvelous way to ensure you’re quoted the highest possible rate.
I was evil, tho…I had no desire to rent them a room but I didn’t want to give them an immediate walkout rate of, say, $259, plus tax, which is what most who had the good sense to book early were paying…I wanted to give them a rate low enuff for them to fret over but high enuff for them to ultimately reject.
$159, plus tax…I’ve been knocking around front desks long enuff to know the rate would be tempting enuff but ultimately too high for them…I was right…They went thru the tribal hemming and hawing cheapskates go thru, before asking me if I could any better…I told them I had no flexibility at all which is, of course, lying thru my teeth…I could’ve charged whatever I damn well pleased with impunity, to include the Hot Babe Rate of $99, plus tax…The one guy again noted it would only be for four hours, down from the original estimate of five, and I flash themed a smile as pleasant as it was non-committal and they left.
About 0300 I got a call from someone looking to cancel a reservation…I looked it up and we had nothing under his name so he tossed out a chick’s name and BOOM, there it was, arriving Friday for a two-night stay…He said it was his wife and I had no reason to doubt this but we just can’t allow someone to call up and cancel someone else’s reservation willy-nilly even tho it’s unlikely he was calling up and canceling his ex’s reservation…He did note his credit card had been used to secure the reservation so I asked him if he could rattle off the last four numbers we’d be set and then I noticed his wife’s email had been used and he was able to tell me what it was and that was OK with me.
Then I had to open my yap and ask for a reason – the system requires one – and he favored me with the whole nine yards…Seems they found a private rental and they have two dogs and who the hell knows what else…Look, I just need to check a box, not provide a narrative…In these situations, tho, it’s generally quicker to let them say their piece and we were done soon enuff.
At 0515 I noticed the snowplow was out front…This was surprising for two reasons…One, there wasn’t a whole lot of snow on the ground and, two, it was 0515 in the morning for Pete’s sake…People are sleeping…So it was hardly the Upset of the Year when 103 calls to whine a few minutes later…She had arrived late and was now woken up…She wasn’t pleased and you wouldn’t have been, either…I listened and expressed an appropriate amount of empathy and offered a complimentary breakfast at the restaurant but she dismissed it so then I declared I would take $25 off her bill…She wasn’t entirely pleased with that, either – she really just wanted her sleep – but I was insistent and, indeed, deducted $25 from her rate.
I emailed Barbara the GM on this one, too, because this was too early to be moving snow in a hotel parking lot and maybe there were specific times laid out in the contract.
And I still haven’t received my eval at the hotel…As I’ve noted here before, tho, night auditors are judged on an entirely different scale than mere desk clerks and it would not be first time a night auditor’s eval has been dispensed with…Yes, you could nitpick a couple, maybe a few things…I’m a man, not an image on a stained glass window, after all, but everyone gets a good night’s sleep when ol’ Sparrow’s scheduled to come in…I show up every night, on time, and do my work reasonably well and actually the eval would end after “shows up every night”…I could care less, really, and am not going to go asking about it.
Dead slow at the Veterans Service Office…I did get to the bottom of Mr B’s request about the results of his exams last summer, but that was really it.
There was about four inches of snow waiting to be moved at The Shire when I got home, right about the threshold of where you either do it or let it go until more piles up…I moved it…What the heck…Key was it was rather warm and you’d hate for some to melt and then re-freeze because then you have a base of ice and that doesn’t do anyone any good whatsoever…Four inches is also at the shovel/snowblower threshold, too because it doesn’t take a whole lot more time to shovel four inches than it does to blow it but I was tired and the snowblower started on the first pull of the cord.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: As usual, there was no sleep to report for 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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