Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Sunday, September 9
Lots of exciting news from the retailer, considering it was only a four-hour shift.
First, there was this rather tedious guy and his girlfriend who wanted to return a lot of hardware stuff, some used, some not, and there were about ten items on three different receipts…All right, he had this testy voice and annoyed me – plus he had the general bearing of someone who knew he was annoying – so I drew this out as long as possible, which you can do without anyone catching on and there wasn’t a line so get comfortable…After taking longer than it should I refunded his money and then he waves one receipt in front of me, points out some items he’d put a star next to and asked if I knew what these items were…One was ID’d as ‘Cartridge’ and the other as something or other…I forget.
Hell, I don’t know…It’s tuff to ID an item off of a receipt description and please forgive me for not having every 10-digit barcode number committed to memory….He asked if I could look up the item and I said, honestly, no, and I suggested ink and ammo for ‘cartridge’ and he looks at me with disdain and announces he didn’t buy ink, his tone the same as if I’d had the nerve to suggest he’d bought a cartridge of yak piss…Good gravy, this guy deserved to be slapped and I said there was no way I could ID these items, and he left.
Then a lady called asking if we sold a certain brand of wine…Some advice: when calling a place like this, it is useful to ascertain if we sell wine at all…She sounded really snobbish, too, like a woman who could afford to buy wine at real liquor store and not some discount retail chain……Heck, I was surprised she didn’t ask if we sold foie gras, too…As it is, we do not – not – sell wine…We do sell beer, that 3.2 crap because that’s all the state will allow us to sell, the better to protect the liquor stores, I guess.
Towards the end four guys came in, all white, 40ish, plainly on a boys weekend came in…They needed provisions, including playing cards and poker chips and one had already gotten a head start on the festivities by getting the first weed – which is legal here – of the trip smoked…They reminded of some guys I met when I was working security at a Vegas hotel and got a call to go to a room and investigate the smell of weed that had been reported…My partner and I got there and the guys were leaving the room and they saw us and got scared stiff and asked if we were here about the key problem…Noooooo, we weren’t…Weed was a filthy, criminal act back then and we took it fairly seriously because other guests don’t need to be smelling that…We told them exactly what we were going to do…We couldn’t go thru their stuff, but any weed we saw lying around we were going to confiscate and flush down the can…They were heartbroken and what was funny was there was a Playboy next to the can…As I recall, they were very cooperative and seemed relieved we weren’t going to call their wives or notify their local newspaper.
Raj was at Hotel B when I arrived…He said there would two new people in in the morning…Jim and Jessie, a married couple that work for the company at some other hotel…Koric, the kid who had been working day shift is gone…Had a fight with his girlfriend…Got kicked out…Had no place to go so, naturally, he quit his job tho why you quit your job immediately after going homeless is not immediately clear…One, at a minimum, it’s shelter for eight hours a day, plus you can help yourself to the complimentary breakfast, so there’s food, too…And we have a history of putting employees up and he might well have been able to scam a room because both hotels have openings and there are zero – zero – applicants for any of our 45 open positions.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Sunday until 1530 Sunday…7.0 hours…This is a pretty solid start to the sleep week and we are already two hours ahead of last week’s lousy pace.
Actually, I was up a bit before the 1530 alarm, not enough to affect today’s entry, but a few minutes…The Sleep Log, of course, isn’t to be confused with a FitBit and we are not going to quibble and will continue to round up – or down – as we see fit.
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.
