Indeed, Read Free Sunday (RFS) rolls on at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, October 23
There was some modest intrigue with both cash drawers tonite.
First, the right drawer – aka ol’ Sparrow’s home drawer – was $1.45 over, an odd amount to be over because, as noted, everything sold at the sundry stand ends in either a whole dollar or a half-dollar, including tax…So I recounted the dimes and the nickels and even the ones and it all came out the same…For some reason, yours truly didn’t want to drop the $1.45, so a nickel was found in a drawer in the back office and tossed in there so a dollar-fifty could be dropped.
The left drawer had way too many coins in the trays…First, there were 52 quarters and then 51 pennies, the correct amount because there were a couple of receipts in there that had been paid out.
Look, there is no reason to have more coins in a tray than there are in a roll, so I took 50 of each and put them in separate baggies and put these in the drawer…Officially, this was done so Tammy will be spared having to count so many coins but let’s be honest here, saving ol’ Sparrow from having to count them again tomorrow was key, too.
Despite the fact we weren’t that close to being sold out, ol’ Sparrow decided to be firm on the $150, plus tax, The System was asking and both walk-ins accepted it without a murmur…The second one, Ms S, I think I would marry if she asked me…She had called earlier, saying she had just dropped her boyfriend off at the hospital and she needed a room for two nights…She gets here and she’s pleasant and funny and if she wasn’t competing with Terri and Alejandra for space in the center of the wheelhouse, she was certainly entitled to admittance…She liked me, too…I looked up when returning her credit card to her and she was staring at me with googlie eyes…Later, some stalking – er, research – showed her boyfriend was basically me: bald, bearded and not particularly difficult on the eyes, so no wonder she was all but disrobing.
Turns out their road trip has been one long medical crisis…The boyfriend had lost his appendix in Pennsylvania and there’s some sort of infection now that no one in the big city was altogether interested in treating and so she dropped him off here, tho yours truly didn’t mention there’s been more than one person who’s said this really isn’t the best hospital, tho the one in the next county appears to be fairly highly regarded.
Later a guest came by lamenting the fact that there was no place open to eat and I nodded and said the sundry stand was really the only option right now and I don’t think either of us had any idea that a Line of the Year candidate was coming up…He wanders over to look at it and he asked if the two-pack pizzas were any good.
– Yeah, they’re not too bad.
He looks over and nods.
– They look OK…
– Of course, it’s the only option now…It’s suitably marked up.
He laffed.
– Of course, it is…How much?
I didn’t even blink; it was classic Sparrow timing:
– They’re forty-five dollars, sir.
You know, offhand yours truly didn’t think it was that great a line, but it got such a good laff it was immediately heralded as a Line of the Year candidate.
The installation of the new key system is completed and the hot, new Sparrow All-Access Key (SAAK) Front Desk Manager Brandon made up for me got field tested this morning…The plan was to test it out first on the storeroom next to 102 but that takes a hard key and not even the new keys work on those, so its first test was at the laundry room…Test sat(isfactory) as we used to say in the Nav and it worked everywhere else it was tested, too.
The big news is the end-of-month paperwork from August was in the shred pile…I am not making that up…It hadn’t been touched, much less used, either: the original binder clips were still there, as were the paper clips and rubber band holding it all together…It had been knocking around – more or less untouched – the back office desk but with the new key system’s computer and monitor now taking up residence on the back office desk, I guess it was expendable…I have no idea why 1) it hadn’t been used and, 2) why they even have me waste paper like this and print it out…Recall end of month procedures call for printing out of the folios of both zeroed out house accounts and accounts receivables and why we’re wasting paper like this isn’t immediately clear.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1130 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…10.0 hours for the day and 52.5 hours for the week, the third 50-hour sleep week in the last four.
Now, there is still another sleep week left to go this month, but ol’ Sparrow would have to more or less stay up the entire week for the October weekly average to fall below 50 hours…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.
Gaylon’s books can also be found at The Reading Salon.
