Indeed, it’s Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, May 14
Boy, yours truly was tired tonite…Regular readers of this crap know that the past three sleep “sessions” have only yielded 13 hours of sleep – something we’ve picked up in one day in the past – and ol’ Sparrow was a half-step off all nite long…It affected the nitely labors, too, as ol’ Sparrow was sort of slow and made some mistakes he usually doesn’t and he wasn’t back from walking the hotel until 0115 on a routine nite
Well, both arrivals did show up…The first was a guy and probably his son and they’d had a completely convoluted day, getting in a few hours later than planned…Plus their luggage ended up somewhere else, so the gent asked if I could spare a toothbrush and some toothpaste…Of course I could, and they both were grateful when I also came out with shaving tackle and deodorant…We’re pretty well stocked in the back and yours truly could’ve offered tampons, too, but they neither requested nor, under the circumstances, needed.
The other arrival spoke almost no English, so ol’ Sparrow’s Spanglish (OSS) was key here…Far from laughing at it – which it deserves because it’s pretty simpleton-ish – he seemed grateful for a relatively smooth check-in process.
The to-date May numbers, compared to this month last year, are pretty good…They’re pretty much the same, actually, but last May was pretty strong…Revenue is up a bit, rooms rented are down a tad, so that means the Average Daily Rate (ADR) is up a few bucks.
Around 0515 this gent comes up and asks for some toilet paper and to whine about the ice machine near his room not putting out tons of ice every time he presses the button…As it was, in the Upset of the Year, we didn’t have any toilet paper at the front desk and just as we were going to start walking to the housekeeping office to get some, this older lady comes down the hall, thrilled that she had just seen a bear in the parking lot…Her husband was asleep and she was in the mood to chat, we got the full briefing on the bear and how they don’t scare her altho, frankly, she doesn’t exactly want to share her room with them.
Christ, that biddy was all over me…The instant – instant! – I returned to the lobby she was blabbing about the bear again before seamlessly transitioning into details of her stay (she’s here for three more nites) and then into how she actually used to live here in town ages ago…Fortunately, I was able to withdraw in fairly short order but then she shanghaied Javier the porter!!!…I am not making that up…They exchanged names before Javier confessed to not speaking much English…It didn’t stop her from babbling, of course – minor things like language barriers never do – and yours truly felt a tad guilty sitting in the back office and spared from this and thought, perhaps, he should go to the lobby and tap Javier out.
There are still four creamers offered at Morning Coffee Service (MCS): French vanilla For ages tho, there were only three, so there are only three creamers baskets in the MCS drawers, to replenish the MCS creamer rack with…At first, that new Italian sweet creme crap (ISCC) shared a basket with half & half before some wizard – there are no suspects – decided that French vanilla could do without a basket…This is completely and utterly whack, of course, because we move a lot of French vanilla, so this morning I moved the spare ISCC to a portion of a box that held some sugar packets and gave French vanilla its own basket again.
In other news from the MCS desk, there’s a fly in the ointment with the addition of French roast coffee to the lineup…In the past, when we only had one type of coffee, you could combine the contents of an almost empty pot with the contents of an almost full pot…Not anymore…This morning I went to check MCS pot levels (MCSPL) and the French roast pot was about a third full, just enuff to top off the other pot except for the fact in the other pot was European blend…Seeing as yours truly is not a qualified coffee mixologist, he didn’t dare mix the two.
(Incidentally, don’t jump to any conclusions about French roast being more popular than European blend; the right pot gets used way more than the left pot…In fact, you could put an insecticide in the right pot and it would still get used more than the left pot.)
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 2030 Saturday…11.5 hours for the day and 44.0 hours for the week, a figure we strongly suspect is the lowest since the March 2019 troubles…Still tho, when you have a Legion post meeting and dinner with the beautiful Carolyn interrupting your treasured sleep patterns, these things happen.
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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!
