Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, February 6
Sold out at the hotel, and appropriately busy, too, the first real ski season night we’ve had since last ski season before lockdown…It was so busy, Front Desk Manager Brandon was there when I reported for duty even tho he was supposed to leave at 2000 and Assistant Front Desk Manager Q was pouty, as he usually gets when he’d overworked.
I spent most of the night saying we were sold out, both on the phone and to walk-ins, which was great fun, especially when they would ask why, what’s up???…Well, dingwad, it’s Friday in ski season at a ski resort that had A LOT of snow in the past 24 hours and a lot of people decided to come up, people who had the good sense to book a room in advance.
Not all of them made it, either…There were twelve arrivals remaining when I took over, an awfully high number, and it turned out the pass was closed, meaning they had to detour farther down the Interstate before heading north, a detour I know from experience is at least an hour longer and that’s with good weather and good roads.
Some even called to verify we weren’t going to sell their room to someone else…Of course not…You book a room and leave a credit card you’re good, we’ll keep your room all night…One guy who called never did make it…I don’t know if he crashed and died or got a room somewhere else or tried to and failed and slept in his car and another who called showed up at 0500,
One of the guys I said sold out to told me OK, no worries and I thought, yeah, no worries for me, I’m warm right now and you’re looking for a place to stay…As usual, a couple of others were pissed at me because they lacked the foresight to book in advance.
There were also two phone calls from guests stuck downtown looking for a ride back to the hotel and while one took our lack of transportation in stride another got snitty…This usually isn’t a problem because most winters the city bus (free to the rider) runs until after the bars close, but this isn’t a normal winter, of course, and the bus has been running on offseason hours since last March…In fact, now that I think about it, they still are running until after the bars close, but bars are closing at 2300 now, if not earlier, and both called after the bus had stopped running, leaving a taxi as the only option.
It was so busy the audit wasn’t started until well after midnight and while the last folio was delivered around 0200 – pretty good under the circumstances – only a bare minimum of project work was done because I’ve learned over the years that on busy nights like this to get everything done ASAP because you have no idea what is going to happen, so the usual 0500 stuff was started at 0240 or so.
About this time a guest wandered up saying he is booked for tonight but his buddy has a room here Saturday night and could we work it out so he didn’t have to come by and check-in and he could stay in the same room…This is actually not an uncommon request and I did some checking and BOOM it turned out we couldn’t because the room types are different…Had they been the same I could have assigned the same room to the Saturday arrival, but because they were different room types, no, I couldn’t do that and there was no flexibility about changing the room type because we are also fully booked for Saturday night – overbooked, in fact – so there is no leeway with anything at all and I had to the guy he had to check out of this room in the morning and wait until his buddy checked in…Of course, we can store his bags for him, but it’s still a pain in the neck.
My plan to get everything done as early as possible worked…Morning coffee service was out at 0330 and before that the sundry stand was stocked, no small matter because it had been completely laid waste to…To make it as easy as possible on day shift, everything was completely stocked…Not nicely stocked, not mostly stocked, fully stocked, so that there wasn’t any room for anything, consistent with an appealing appearance, of course.
The big news is there were 55 registration cards to prepare for today’s arrivals, the most since lockdown and it’s been so slow at times there have been weeks where we haven’t had 55 arrivals…Only about a quarter of them are rewards club members, meaning there will be opportunities for swing shift, and maybe even Tammy, to rack up some impressive sign-up numbers.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1500 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…6.5 hours for the day and 49.5 hours for the week, a fabulous total…Now, this only 30 minutes shy of a 50-hour sleep week and regular readers of this crap know those aren’t passed out with the rations, but there was no temptation to fudge the figures, the integrity of the Sleep Log is too important.
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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