Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, January 25
Right as I reported for duty the phone rang and it was a guy looking for a room for tonight…Assistant Front Desk Manager Devani was there and she whispered she had quoted some lady $179 for the night…Good to know…It wasn’t a chick but a guy on the line, tho, but $179, plus tax, for a room sounded good so I quoted that and then he wondered what the rate for Saturday night would be…Well, you are going to bend over and take it in the shorts I thought to myself and I was right, the rate for Saturday was a man-sized $330, plus tax, and we were probably going to sell out Saturday so I wasn’t particularly moved to issue a discount.
This guy was a veteran rate gatherer, too…One, asking for Saturday’s rate after getting Friday’s rate is an old trick and I’d made the mistake of earlier telling him hold on, I’d just gotten here, let me see what I have available right off the bat, a cue for him to inform me rates were lower when he’d called a half-hour ago, a trick invented shortly after Bell filed his telephone patent…The only appropriate answer to this is well, you should’ve booked a half-hour ago, but that is hardly in-step with established 5-star service techniques…I was in no mood to hem and haw over this, so I told him I had some flexibility and could offer $179 for tonight, but I had no options for Saturday, a lie, of course…To his credit, the guy recognized when the tablets were coming down from Mt Sinai, didn’t press the matter and hung up.
Later, I got asked the dumbest question in all my years knocking around hotels…I was escorting a coach to one of his player’s rooms so I could open it for him and there was a woman walking in front of us and she stopped at the staircase…She looked at it and then turned to me and asked, and I am not making this up:
Do these stairs go upstairs?
To give her the benefit of every possible doubt, I presumed she was asking if the stairs went to more guest rooms and not, I guess, to some attic torture chamber, but even with that benefit issued, where else would stairs on the first floor of a two-story hotel go to except upstairs?
The previous record for dumbest question came when I was working security in Vegas…I was resolutely standing post in front of the buffet when some wingnut comes up and asks me where the hell the buffet is…Rather than laff at him – another 5-star service technique violation – I graciously stepped aside, extended a hand and advised him it was right here, tho I was obliged to report it was also closed since it was three in the morning.
(There used to be a 24-hour buffet on The Strip, at the old Frontier and I went there fairly regularly…This was when I was fatter than I am now and I’d get off work at 2300 and go because where else could you get deep-fried shrimp, prime rib and breakfast sausage all in one place???)
The big news is the Christmas music is still on in the lobby…I am not making that up…Actually, it’s hard to tell because the volume is turned down really low…Usually, you can hear lobby music in the back office if you’re paying attention but now you have to be standing in the middle of a quiet lobby and really be paying attention…Why it’s even on is beyond me, probably because not having any music playing is a violation of a brand standard, tho I’m sure playing Christmas music in late January probably violates some brand standard, too.
Filled up the new ride today for what has become the usual Saturday morning fill-up and the MPG figure was pretty good: 32.58…Now, that’s about a third of an MPG less than last week’s whopper of 32.87 but I didn’t spend any time fretting about it…32.58 is still a wonderful total.
One thing I’ve learned with the new ride is not to leave it running when filling up, a common enough practice in the winter, because the exhaust pipe is right next to the gas cap and it’s no fun inhaling fumes…On the old car, IIRC, they were on opposite sides.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 1800 Saturday…9.0 hours for the day and we missed a second consecutive 50-hour week by only 30 minutes, the weekly total coming in at 49. 5 hours.
This means the first sleep month of 2020 is in the books and January checks in with a weekly average of 48.125 hours,
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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