Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, March 31
You’re probably wondering about the status of winter here…It’s all but over and it wasn’t real tough to begin with.
Maybe there is something to global warming…The Wife and I just finished our seventh winter up here and maybe two of them have been tough…Our first one was the easiest of them all, so easy one guy told me at the time it was a good starter winter because long-time readers of this crap know that was my first real winter and the first in a long time for The Wife…This winter wasn’t too tough at all…There were bare spots on the lawn most the time and we didn’t have to put the drop the lights under the car to keep the oil warm at all.
A couple of years ago I was scraping three feet of snow off the top of the carport, but most winters have been tolerable.
Did a four-hour shift at the retailer before reporting to the hotel…We get lots of returns and it’s our job to restock them (called go-backs in the trade) and there were a lot of health and beauty go-backs and I was favored with being allowed to restock them…Good gravy, that was a fiasco because if customers see you handling health and beauty stuff in the health and beauty section they naturally assume you know a lot about health and beauty crap – which I don’t – and they ask you lots of questions about it…And not only where something is, either…One lady wanted specific recommendations about how best to treat her sunburn…Hell,I don’t know…I don’t even particularly care how you treat your lousy sunburn or how you got it in the first place…But there I was playing pharmacist, reading the labels so I could, maybe, sound like I knew what I was talking about.
Doing health and beauty go-backs took so long I was obliged to make closing pages from telephones in the field, either at the phone in the photo lab or in the garden center…Let me tell you something, the phone in the garden center is DIRECTLY under a speaker…It would have been nice to know this in advance so I didn’t wet my pants out of fright, but no matter…It plays havoc with you though, if you’re not careful cause there you are talking and there is your voice, loud in your ear and it is the slightest delay, too, more than enough to completely screw you up because if you’ve never been in this situation hearing yourself at the same time you’re talking in this situation really throws you off.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 8:30am-2:30pm, 6 hours…Starting time, of course, is approximate…I got relieved on time, not a given at either hotel, and I was back at The Shire and in bed before 8am…Some people who work graveyards stay up a while and wake up an hour or two before work, but I’ve worked a lot of graveyard over the years and I’ve always preferred to go to right when I get home.
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.
