It is Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, July 3
As we predicted Wednesday, this holiday weekend is not all that busy…Occupancy tonite was 70% or so, and it’s not going to get much higher than that Saturday and it will be lower than that Sunday… An online check showed pretty everyone in town has availability for tomorrow nite and we are asking about $60 more than Hotel A and Hotel B, both comparable competitors…Hotel A was sold out tonite, tho, because they sent a couple of referrals our way.
One was this dumb broad whose cousin had not yet texted her the access code for his condo and what did we have available???…Well, for $200, plus tax, it’s your choice of one or two beds…$200, plus tax, seemed kind of high to her and she asked if we had either government or “manager” rates because evidently, she was the most important manager in our state’s government…Well, ol’ Sparrow has been knocking around front desks for an awfully long time and this was the first request for a “manager’s rate” he’d ever fielded…It was, of course, reminiscent of that dolt at Hotel B who wandered in at zero dark thirty one morning, asking if there was anything on the “reserve list”, another lodging innovation we hadn’t heard of.
Another was this guy who was accustomed to pestering people until he got his way…He didn’t like the $200 rate any more than the broad before him did, and he pulled out the usual lines someone accustomed to being appeased to uses:
– Come on, better to get something for it than nothing…
– I’m sorry sir, the rate’s $200…Plus tax
– We’re going to be out in a few hours anyway…
– I’m sorry sir, the rate’s $200…Plus tax.
People like this generally will stick around and whine some more, but this guy knew resoluteness when he saw it, and turned and walked out.
Then a guy who ID’d himself as being with the band who’d played the bowling alley tonite walked in…(That sounds worse than it is because they have a nice outdoor stage setup.)…He said someone with the bowling alley made a reservation for them and he rattled off a variety of possible names, all guys, but the only two remaining arrivals we had left were chicks…He added that the original reservation was for two rooms, but someone called and later upped it to three, which strongly suggests they are at the wrong hotel, tho he said the bowling alley manager specified our hotel…Eventually, he heads out to sort the matter out and doesn’t come back.
There was a registration card lying around the front desk, too…Amy didn’t have anything to say about it and it was signed and gave every indication it was for an in-house guest and we were about to file it in the bucket when something – call it the instincts all the great ones have if you must – told me to check it out…So I check the room number, 141, and while it is occupied, it is under another name than the one on the reg card…All right, maybe it was moved to another room but the easiest thing to do is check by the confirmation number and BOOM that shows the reservation had actually been canceled and then we went Joe Friday on the matter and looked into it further and this yielded the almost-interesting tidbit that it had been canceled a few minutes after check-in and was a worker who had immediately been called to work somewhere else.
In communications news, the front desk mobile phone went completely bonkers…Immediately after returning from walking the hotel, the screen starts flashing random stuff in half-second intervals…Thinking an incoming call might help, we called it, but it continued to act batty…The only worry here is it might up and randomly call someone who really shouldn’t be bothered in the middle of the nite, so I kept it in the back office to keep an eye on it, but this didn’t happen and eventually, of course, it ran out of juice and again acted normally when we put it back on the charger.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…12.5 hours for the day and 53.5 hours for the week.
Of course, there was a time when a 53+-hour sleep week would’ve been heralded, but we all know that figures like this are routine now…In the Navy, we called a long sleep session like this an equalizer – named after some sort of battery charge when you were out at sea – and every hour was needed…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.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
