Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Sunday, October 18
The problem of having 120 rooms booked at a 117-room hotel was solved without having to procure rooms at another hotel, known as walking a guest in the trade, which was good because it was unlikely there were any rooms to be had anywhere else in town…Assistant Front Desk Manager Q reported Front Desk Manager Brandon got on the horn with our arrivals and found two that wouldn’t be making it…Since the third reservation was a hold by the hotel, we ended up with 117 rooms rented, so we were in on time…A quick check of the occupancy report for the next few days showed there weren’t any other overbooked days on the horizon.
Fiscal stability may turn out to be the hallmark of Q’s assistant front desk manager stewardship because tonight he was fretting about the amount of coffee we were throwing away tonight…Q advised that we wasted darn near five pots of coffee today…This means every pot of coffee was full, or almost full: the two in service and the three spares, which means someone on day shift wasn’t paying attention and which probably cost the company eight bucks or so…I agreed that was a lot of coffee to throw out – as I made my own fresh pot for the night, half of which would get tossed in the morning anyway – tho there really isn’t much I can do about it….I mean, if day shift wants to make too much coffee, there really isn’t much ol’ Sparrow can do about it.
There was – for reasons which may never be known – one of those label stickers you make in a machine in the shred pile that said ‘Hickory Barbeque’ on it…No, I don’t know what’s going on, either, because there are a lot of unanswered questions…Offhand, I’m thinking the only hickory bbq anything we have are the potato chips at the sundry stand, but those aren’t labeled because the flavor is right there on the package…Nor was it immediately clear why the label was deemed confidential enough to be put in the shred pile…Maybe the existence that we have something, anything, hickory BBQ flavored is super top secret, so tactical that we dare not disclose its existence, but if that’s the case why make a label in the first place…Yours truly declined to waste any more time on it and shredded it, just for funsies.
Our lack of Hot Pockets – recall they’re on backorder from the supplier of all things – bit us tonight, as this young couple wandered in about 0100 after their night’s revels looking for munchies…Well, the female half, who gave the impression of recent weight gain, wanted some munchies…She ended up with chips, a Twix, some M&Ms, and some Oreos and a vitamin water, evidently for good health, and the girl wondered aloud where the Hot Pockets were…This was over and above the leftover pizza the guy said they had left in the room…I told them we usually carry Hot Pockets, but haven’t had a delivery in a while.
There was time to kill tonight…Usually between hotel stuff and project work I’m doing something all night, but project work was as up-to-date as it’s going to get by 0200 and I was starting to doze off, so I put my feet up on the back desk and watched stuff, setting the alarm for 0400 just in case yours truly dozed off, which I almost did…I was bothered about 0330 by some hapless loser who had hit the road without bothering to secure a place to sleep, but that was it.
At about 0650 164 calls…It’s a man with a raspy, irritated voice and he sounded like the type who had a good working knowledge of being irritated…He reported his coffee maker wasn’t working, noting this was a fabulous start to his day.
One thing yours truly has to admit is I have never been clear who handles coffee pots in hotels, housekeeping or maintenance…As it was, only Holli from housekeeping was in, so I called her and while she didn’t clarify the matter she said she’d look into it and a few minutes later she calls back to report the problem was operator error, the guest couldn’t figure out how to use it, which is funny because, you know, these things are made with dolts in mind and are designed to be easy to use.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 6.0 hours, estimated.
I have no idea how long or definitely when I slept today…I did some reading and went to bed about 0830 and you lie there and after a long while you check the time and it’s been a couple of hours since you turned in but you don’t think you’ve been up the whole time but you’re not entirely certain you slept, either, but then you remember you start recalling dream fragments so start thinking you slept some but you are unable to reckon for how long.
So I got up around noon-ish and started in on project work and then did some reading and all in all passed a very pleasant afternoon until I dozed off at who-knows-what time.
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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