It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, May 12
Mark appeared out of sorts tonight…He’s pretty reserved and hardly does backflips when I report for duty, but he was quieter than usual tonight…He sounded tired and he didn’t even offer his usual turnover spiel – which seldom varies by more than a couple of words each week – when I presented myself to relieve him.
It even carried over to his cash drawer spreadsheets (CDSS)…Regular readers of this crap know Mark has been mixing it up a bit late, varying the ink and highlighter colors…Tonight, tho, both were the same – recall sometimes they are different – as he utilized red ink for his signatures and blue to highlight the day, date and amounts…He’s still accenting his name with a highlighter slash, tho, so he’s not completely off-kilter.
Ol’ Sparrow set a personal best tonight when yours truly entered over $47,000 in MasterCard revenue when filling out the credit card revenue sheet…Now, this isn’t due any particular merit on ol’ Sparrow’s part; it’s merely the most credit card revenue he’s ever entered…It is curious, tho, because we didn’t do $47K worth of total room revenue yesterday, much less that amount on one card…And it was slow enuff – and ol’ Sparrow was curious enuff – to look it up…It wasn’t too difficult: you generate a MasterCard transaction report for the day in question and BOOM there it was: a 46K charge by Front Desk Manager Brandon for the airline’s outstanding balance from their crew’s rooms during ski season…Now, I’m not Mr Accounting, but it seems to me that is an awful lot of money to have outstanding for a business this size and I’m glad Brandon was on top of it…I know you are, too.
There were a couple of guest funnies tonight and both involved dogs…First, it’s Ms P, the last arrival of the night…We’re almost done and I ask if she has a dog and she says yeah, so I make note of that on the registration card and get a pet form for her to fill out…While she’s doing that she notes the line asking for a disposition:
– Pleasant.
– Good call…No one ever puts anything else, like mean.
She smiles, looks at me and after a pretty nice comedic pause says:
– Beware.
Her tone was sly and got a chuckle out of me, tho perhaps you had to be there.
The other dog funny came about 0615 when a gent stopped by the front desk to check out and he said his stay was very nice and continued to gush about the elements he found favor with, tho the night auditor wasn’t one of them…Then he noted the two doggie beds kept behind the front desk and wondered why there wasn’t on duty right now:
– I’ve seen at least four different ones here…
– Well, we keep 1`7 dogs on staff here, sir…
He didn’t miss a beat.
– How are they to work for???
– Oh, they run a tight ship, sir…No doubt.
It was slow at the veterans service office today and the big news is there wasn’t a presentation at the 1000 Zoom meeting…(Actually, it’s a WebEx meeting, but kinda like band-aid or zipper have evolved from brand name to trade names, so has Zoom…Or at least it has at the VSO.)…The presenter had to cancel at the last minute and Brian was out of the office so we just logged in and BSed for a while which was boring because yours truly has few BSing skills and while some shop was talked, I only lasted 15 minutes or so.
At 1030 Mr C called announcing he was in the parking lot…Recall we applied for an adaptive housing grant from the VA last week and then it turned out there was something else we needed to add, and I had the extra from ready for his signature…He had his trailer that had his wheelchair on it, but it was a pain in the ass to get going and could I come down with the form for him to sign???…Of course I could and I head down and ask how things are going.
Not good…His future brother-in-law wrecked his fiancé’s car and his sister miscarried and her fallopian tubes exploded and were bleeding into her abdomen and for his part he was going in for surgery next week to have a metal rod placed in his leg and they would have to re-break it which sounded silly because why would you again break a leg that had already broken once, but I’m not a doctor and what do I know.
And this was on top of last week’s maladies…It was tuff to take and so I lied and said I was in the middle of a phone conversation even though I wasn’t and was merely farting around doing project work.
It reminded me of this Covid video I saw last year that showed how to recognize symptoms and had a girl in a hospital bed and I don’t recall much else but I was having a physical reaction to it and I had to stop watching it…I work hard to make good things happen for myself and while bad things do happen to me from time to time, they’re relatively rare
At 1245 there was a knock on the door…I was caught by surprise and the falsies weren’t in, they were in some water in a cup on my desk…It’s still the Virus Era, tho, so this wasn’t a problem as it was a simple matter to put a mask on.
Turns out it’s Kelly and Julie, the Human Service department head and assistant department head and, God bless them, they’re bearing pizza…They’re on a goodwill mission in the building and they offered me a couple of slices and, not wanting to cause offense, I took them…I hadn’t seen either for a year or so, but if they were caught up in emotion over this they hid it marvelously and quickly moved on to the Building Department.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: As usual for Wednesday, there is no sleep to report today.
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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