It’s Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, August 6
This will surprise you, but a credit card processor is on the fritz at the hotel…Recall two of the new ones broke and today Amy reported that one of the replacements broke today and that she broke it.
These are not industrial-strength machines…The first two were hardly thrown against a wall and Amy said the processor on the left machine broke when she was gluing it on a deal that spins 360 degrees, so either the guest or the desk clerk can use it…She said she put the glue on the bottom, and pressed it down and BOOM the blue screen of death (BSD) immediately reported for duty and they appear fragile enuff that they would probably shatter if we stood and stared at it crossly with our hands on our hips.
Boy, we really struggled with the wake-up call greeting tonite…It took several takes and the first ones sound as if we’d just started speaking English last week…Most of the problem was format: do we start off with “good morning” or do we go bold with introducing ourselves before rolling right into the dramatic “this is your wake-up for Saturday, August 6”???…In the end, we did the latter, and while we weren’t completely thrilled with it, we didn’t want to spend the entire shift trying for perfection.
About midnite this guy calls looking for a room and we’ve been knocking around front desks long enuff to know a guy who’s looking for a place to score…We had pretty good availability, tho The System was still asking $290, but we quoted $225 and evidently the prospect wasn’t all that hot because he said no.
All of which reminded me of the time we were working a sleazy motel on the Sin City Strip when this gent wanders in and announces he’s staying at the Luxor, that he needs another room, and did we rent by the hour???…He seemed disappointed to find out we didn’t.
The big news is ol’ Sparrow had to improvise for Sparrow Spinach tonite…The usual recipe for a while now has been tossing some butter and croutons requisitioned from the restaurant in there, along with a dose of that Dorothy Lynch dressing, the state vegetable of Nebraska…Well, we left the new bottle of dressing at home, so we improvised with some bleu cheese dressing from the restaurant and it wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t that great, either, more motivation to remember it for tomorrow.
(As it was, as a specific against forgetting the bottle of dressing again – a possibility which could be entirely dismissed – we went to the grocery store after the hotel and bought another bottle and put it directly in our backpack so it would be impossible to forget.)
We’re starting to think about getting out of town for a couple of days later this month…The big city’s baseball team has a day game on Wednesday the 24th and this could be a perfect time to play hookey from the veterans service office (VSO) for a day and stay a couple of days in the big city…The team sucks this year, and so does their opponent that day, so getting a decent seat won’t be a problem, and the employee rate’s available at the hotel we usually stay at, the one where the front desk manager once pepper sprayed a guest…Thursday would be a great opportunity to go to the used bookstore in the college town north of the big city and maybe see if Terri’s free for dinner…She may not be because her new gig as the media contact for the big city VA keeps her running around pretty good, but she’s been known to make room for ol’ Sparrow in the past.
The problem with more books is we have no more bookshelf space at The Shire, with books now being housed on the floor next to the chair and on the rocking chair and the couch…There’s room for more bookcases in the spare bedroom tho, and that could provide the impetus for actually going in and cleaning it up, because regular readers of this crap know the spare bedroom has been used for storage – a very charitable term – since The Ex left.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…12.5 hours for the day and 52.5 hours for the week, both splendid totals.
We left the windows open all nite and it was actually cool enuff to sleep with covers on when we went down…It warmed up, of course, so they were kicked off later, but that didn’t prevent a wonderful day in the sack.
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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.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
