Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, April 14
Screwed up morning coffee this afternoon, neglecting to put the pot all the way in…This resulted in the thingy on top overflowing, spilling on the top of the dryer, where the coffee pot is kept…Fortunately, we keep a towel on top of the dryer, insurance against Sparrow doing exactly this, and it sopped it all up.
Now, here is where The Wife being off house sitting causes problems: if she is not house sitting, if she is around The Shire regularly, I clean up and toss the towel in the wash…She’s not tho, so I left it as it, not wanting to interfere with the natural order.
Also, with The Wife gone, clean laundry tends to be stowed on the kitchen table.
At the retailer, I spent most of the time working a register…I was at #3 with nothing to do because we were very slow when this rather tedious looking woman summons me over to the service desk, where she is doing something or another with Customer Service Sam, who had gone off in search of a manager to deal with her crap…I get there and it turns out she is cashing a check…Or trying to, Customer Service Sam initially saying no because her ID is expired…Evidently, since I am white and Customer Service Sam is black – not to mention from Senegal so he talks funny – I’d have the good sense to authorize this transaction…Well, I told her, no I won’t…You must have a valid ID to cash a check here…What I wanted to tell her was you should probably take better care of your identification papers and stop trying to finagle your way around the rules…Or get a checking account.
There’s a rather amiable older gentleman we see every day…I was working my beloved Aisle 5 when he stopped by with some stuff in a cart and asked me if we had fig newtons…Crap, I thought, you’d think so…They’re pretty common and it’s probably in the bylaws somewhere that we have to have them so I go and look and we had them but not the Leading National Brand (LNB), we had the house brand which the gentleman turned his nose up at which was surprising because when he came thru Aisle 5 a few minutes later he had four packages of the house brand oatmeal cookies…Hell, I think I’d rather eat some old carpeting than that…I asked him if these were snacks or a meal plan and he said snacks…Five a day plus some milk are keys to his good health.
– You’re a maniac.
– I know.
Towards the end of the shift, a young woman came by the service desk looking for her lost wallet…She was completely stoned, too, you could see it in her eyes…Her wallet was long and “sparkly” with “turds” on it…I am not making that up!!!…A girl lost a wallet with turd designs on it…Christ, I thought my generation had taken the gene pool down a notch letting our boxer shorts hang below our cutoffs but this took it to a whole ‘nother level…Good gravy…Crap designs on personal accessories…Anyway, I checked and told her no, no wallets with turds on them had been turned in.
Then Shawna, who works clothing, which is near the service desk came by to report the girl was “a piece of work”…I nodded, adding girls like that made me glad I never reproduced cause I’d probably be a drunk right now…Shawna said the girl, who’s 18 or so, had tried to date her son who is four years younger which didn’t go over well with Shawna at all.
“But I let her hang out for a while, at the house tho,” she said. “So my son could see what a loser she was. If you tell him you can’t see her he’s going to see her anyway.”
Did it work?
“Yeah, he stopped asking her over…Plus me hissing at her probably gave her a clue, too.”
Reporting for duty at Hotel A tonight Nicole said she is still all set to start moving into her new house Sunday…She said the rent is paid in her current place through the end of the month and that could have caused some money issues but one of her new roommates said the rent was paid on the new place till the end of the month so the rent karma worked out…One problem is Nicole doesn’t have a car and that will make moving difficult…Ol’ Sparrow would have offered to help but I sleep days and have the retailer and whatnot…The big thing is she is relieved not to have to worry about having her deodorant stolen anymore.
Later I gave Nicole some glass cleaner training…She had spent part of her shift cleaning windows – the pool is adjacent to the lobby and there are lots of windows – and she was out of window cleaner…Well, most hotels have dispensers for stuff like this so they don’t have to buy it by the bottle and I took Nicole to the maid’s room where they a dispenser for this…Select the cleaner you need, press the button and add water because it’s concentrated…Nicole fretted that it wouldn’t clean very good but we went back to the lobby and tried a test window and it earned Nicole’s seal of approval.
Sparrow Sleep Log: 8:30am Saturday morning until 2:30pm Saturday afternoon…Officially, I’m “surprised” I don’t sleep longer on Saturdays…I mean, when I went down this morning I’d been up for 26 hours, normal for Saturday morning, but so is waking up mid-afternoon, too….I think it’s because I’d had 24 hours of sleep since I got off work Wednesday morning, a nap and two nine-hour sessions, so it was hardly as if I was deprived.
Slept well, too, so well there wasn’t any waking up to use the can around noon or so, as there sometimes is, and I dreamt pleasantly tho don’t ask me what about because I seldom remember.
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.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 18th century British novel of the same name.
