Yes, it’s Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, June 11
Everything was a hassle tonite…Guests were annoying me by buying assorted crap that – despite fawning accolades – they had no business consuming before beddy-bye…Then the right drawer was $4 short…Then yours truly inadvertently rang up a $21 credit card sale as cash because the MasterCard button was directly below the Cash button.
Crap, this is a first, even for yours truly, and there some zero clue how to proceed…Standard procedure in uncharted waters is, of course, to refer the matter to Tammy on day shift, but some of you keeping score at home may strongly suspect this has to be rectified before the nite audit is done and the accounting goes from Friday to Saturday.
You would be right…We can’t let a $21 cash charge go thru without dropping a corresponding $21 in cash…Ol’ Sparrow could write a ream of notes on the matter and everyone’s accounting would still be $21 short…Besides, ol’ Sparrow is paid not to let these things happen and, if they do happen, to rectify the matter without inconveniencing – or, worse, calling – anyone.
So we called tech support wondering if the transaction could be deleted and the guy said no, it could not and then it hit me that a corresponding minus-$21 transaction would balance matters out nicely, so I brought up the Post It window, found the way to do it, entered a minus-$21 transaction and BOOM, mission accomplished.
During all this a guy comes up asking if we have laundry detergent for sale, a logical question since the dispenser in the laundry room is still OOC…We do have them for sale – sacks of two pods for a dollar – but it turns out he only needs one, and I’m happy enuff to issue him one with my compliments…He then asks for two dollars in change for the washer…Ol’ Sparrow produces this and as he turned to walk away, holds up a hand and asks what seems to be a fairly logical question:
Uh, sir, are you going to dry your clothes, too?
Oh no, he said, making it sound like dryers were created by Satan on the seventh day as He rested, I let them air dry…In what was probably moderately funny, I nodded my head and held up a palm, as if air-drying clothes while staying in a hotel was actually the favored method of millions.
Then a guy comes up and announces he took a pack of playing cards and some chapstick and could these be charged to 105???…Well, sure, especially if that’s your room…He was one of those who thought everyone’s purpose was to listen to him and he asks if he looks good…He was wearing a gray blazer that was OK, I suppose – we wouldn’t be caught dead in it – but we fawned over it as if it were Blazer of the Year (it’s not, my brown corduroy blazer is) which was exactly what he wanted to hear…My suits are Brooks Brothers, so yours truly has some street cred here but, with some discretion, declined to tell him this.
To top everything off we are dangerously low on copy paper and there is no longer a stand for the phone in the back office…Recall yours truly broke it a while back, but it was repaired and put back in service, but it’s gone now.
We were up pretty early today (see Sleep Log below) so we got some watering done and our neighbor across Maple Street, Zach, was out mowing his lawn…We hadn’t chatted in ages and he waved and turned off his mower, my cue to head over…He’s doing a lot in his yard…Longtime readers of this crap may – or they may not, it’s been a while – recall he put in a chicken coop some time back but he’s got a greenhouse now, and some other fenced-off gardens and whatnot and when the lawn’s mowed it actually looks pretty nice…I told him there have been a couple of times I’d seen his chickens outside his gate and he laffed and said hell, they’ve made their way over to The Shire a couple of times, evidently looking for bugs.
You could hear other lawn mowers in the neighborhood going, too, which is good because, boy, there are some lawns that really need it, including one a couple of blocks down that we strongly suspect is vacant right now because the lawn hasn’t been touched all season and the grass, and weeds, have to be a foot high.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
0830 Saturday until 1300 Saturday
1730 Saturday until 2130 Saturday
8.5 hours for the day and 54.0 for the week, the first 50+-hour week in a month and a full 12.0 hours more than last week’s anemic total.
We are thru whining about Saturday Split Sleep Sessions (SSSS), too…We got watering, project work, and reading in and all in all it was a pleasant afternoon.
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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!
