It’s Reaf Free Sunday at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, July 10
Amy was being chatted up by a couple of ruffians – attention she rather enjoys – when yours truly reported for duty, so it was up to yours truly to help the gent looking for a room when yours truly favored the world with his arrival at the front desk…The town is completely booked and the guy, a working man in town for a while – was looking for a room as soon as we could deliver one.
That’s tuff because we’ve been sold out the past three nites and will be again tomorrow nite, so Sunday’s the first nite we have availability, but that’s only for three nites before the sold-out nites resume…Then Amy opened her yap and said one booking for tomorrow was a hold by the hotel, a common practice when we’re sold out, and I could just insert his name…Crap…It would have been very nice had Amy decided to keep her yap shut here, tho this is a road less traveled for Amy, as it is for no small number of other women, too…The guest heard this, of course, and this could have caused problems for someone less adroit than yours truly…I said, truthfully, sir, I can’t overbook the hotel like that because the room is held back for a reason and if my tone caused the guy to think this reason was an industry secret, well I have no control over that.
Of course, there was the usual (dumb) query as to why we were so busy…Well, there’s the general tourist trade, of course, plus firemen and some displaced by those fires remain in house, too…And that infernal balloon rodeo is in town…This may sound exciting but it’ not because it’s not as if there are balloon races or balloon rides or anything else fun to do…There’s not, there’s just a bunch of balloons taking off and flying around for a while…It’s kinda like ski jumping…Wow the first time you see it in person, moderately interesting the second and third times and well, that was nice a few minutes later.
Business is really good this weekend…Room revenue tonight topped 30K for the first time that I can remember and the average daily rate (ADR) was a lusty 257 and rates are now routinely topping $300/nite, a hell of a rate for a hotel of this sort…In fact, business was so good the right cash drawer was bursting at the seams with almost $900 in it…I am not making that up…Amy said it was like that when she came on and I ended up dropping $690.41 overage…It’s not immediately clear why there was so much money in the right drawer tho the source could’ve been discovered soon enuff, but it wasn’t all that important to know.
The knife was clutch today, getting a lot of use, all rather late in the shift, too, as two creamer boxes – half & half and French vanilla – and an entire new box of coffee had to be opened and the old boxes broken down…The coffee packs were down to the last few, too, and really should’ve been replaced on my nites off, but the new guy couldn’t be bothered to do this, just like he can’t be bothered to produce new key packets or stock the sundry stand.
He did, tho, print out the registration cards for Saturday’s arrivals by mistake and left them in my box…However, since there were probably reservations made since they were printed out, I printed new ones out…Now, you’re probably thinking the unused reg cards would make primo – primo! – scratch paper after the stack was depleted following last week’s coffee spill, and they would have, but in all candor, yours truly didn’t think about that until a few seconds before writing this paragraph.
Between actual hotel work and project work ol’ Sparrow was busy all night…The post-audit hotel walk wasn’t completed until 0130 because guests kept pestering me – there were several parking queries because evidently all perceived legal parking spots were taken…Look, I don’t really care where you park as long as you’re not blocking one, my car, two any other car or, three the back doors to the restaurant…People tho, seem to think we care…We don’t, and I have yet to work at a hotel that does…Plus, there 60 arriving registration cards to process and new key packets to make and morning coffee service (MCS) was moving product like hotcakes and regular readers of this crap know keeping MCS fresh and attractive is a personal quest of mine.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Saturday until 1900 Saturday…9.5 hours for the day and a splendid – a word not thrown around willy-nilly here – 49.0 hours for the week.
Like you may have been, ol’ Sparrow was fretting the return of the Friday Nite Nap (FNN) might’ve hindered the Saturday Sleep Session (SSS) but plainly that wasn’t the case…God bless all of you.
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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