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Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, October 20
Very slow at the retailer tonight…If I averaged more than a handful of transactions per hour at the service desk I would be surprised.
One was a guy sending $20 to Colombia…This was rare for a couple of reasons: one, people seldom send $20…The least is generally $50 and even that is comparatively rare and, two, Columbia is not a common destination…There are regular senders to Honduras, but that is as far south it generally gets. (For the record, the most anyone generally sends is $1,000…Sometimes you will get more than that but it is rare and most transactions over $2,500 – to anywhere – are declined by MoneyGram.)
Out of curiosity I checked what the exchange rate was (it’s right there on the receipt) and one US dollar will get you 3,000 some-odd Colombian pesos, which seemed awfully high but I double-checked and what do I know besides…You can put high exchange rates to work for you, tho…I remember dating a girl in Mexico years ago, mid-90s, and the exchange rate was $1 equaled 20,000 pesos, which was great if you’re a bachelor because you cross the border with $20 (about $37 in today’s dollars) in your pocket, take your date to dinner and then a movie and you still had a couple of bucks on the drive home…Later, the Mexican government moved the decimal point over and overnight one dollar was worth twenty pesos, but that was only cosmetic and the working bachelor still made out pretty good.
There was some green Play-Doh knocking around self-checkout tonight…Tyler was fiddling with it, having announced he was in possession of it because some kid had left it behind…He was making what he termed a snake out of it but it was a pretty ugly snake and I noted it looked more like a dinosaur, which which he didn’t see at all….But it did…Tyler had given it a big nose and you don’t have to be Mr Wild Kingdom to know snakes don’t have big noses…I held out my hand for him to give me the Play-Doh, he puts it in my hand and I start workking it:
Here, I’m going to make Hoover Dam…
This was a pretty funny line, tho Tyler’s pretty young and I’m not entirely sure he got the Hoover Dam reference, so I was left to chuckle to myself and wonder if it was good enough to be a Line of the Year candidate.
Towards the end of the shift I’m walking back from the can when I see Scott walk in…He’s a regular, probably my age or so, short, with all his hair and a short beard, both of which are salt-and-pepper…He’s a friendly sort and always has a harried air about him…He asks me where, of all things, yoga mats are…Scott’s physique, at first glance, does not appear to lend itself to yoga…In fact, Scott has a nice beer gut.
Scott, you’re not taking up yoga, are you???…You’ll kill yourself…
Scott thought I was serious and said no, he wasn’t taking up yoga rather he needed it for some project he was working on…He was going to cut it into strips for padding for something or other, which is typical Scott thinking because he repaired a broken zipper on a jacket by cutting holes in it and running some heavy-duty wire through them…As it was, we have a couple of different yoga mats and he said one of them – I don’t recall the difference between them – would work perfectly.
Had some laffs with Nicole tonight at Hotel B…She was getting ready to clock out (early, so she could catch the early bus…She asked if she could do this yesterday and of course she could and I came straight from the retailer so she could do that again tonight, but don’t tell her that) when she got her phone out to decide what music she was going to listen to on the ride home…She asked what music I liked and I sad I told her I like stuff white guys my age generally like, white, guitar based bands from the 1970s with big hair, which made her laff and she started playing some stuff she liked which, of course, I didn’t recognize at all, and then she got her headphones out and I tried them out and they sounded really good, tho the max volume wasn’t all that great and I announced I like my music cranked because if it’s too loud you’re too old.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 1430 Saturday…I am still completely befuddled by the fact I cannot sleep more than a few hours on Saturdays after I’ve been up for 24 hours…You would think I would sleep straight thru till the 1530 alarm but that has not been the case for a couple-three, maybe a few, weeks now.
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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