Q: Is it Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary?
A: Of course it is.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, August 19
Boy, we dove right in on the action tonite at the hotel, and it was busy enuff that you thought it might set the tone for the entire shift and a long, clusterf*ck nite but, fortunately, no, this wasn’t the case at all; it was merely a brief storm before the calm.
Gina, as she is wont to do, left a guest request – toilet paper for 258 – for me to handle…She does this regularly, graciously allowing me to limber up for my shift rather than having to endure the torture of easing into it….Right as we were leaving to deliver toilet paper to 258, 207 calls to whine about the condition of their sheets.
Crap, this could be a real pain in the arse…We’re pretty squared away here and maids do not routinely put dirty sheets on beds but boy, if a mistake of that sort had been made it could result in ol’ Sparrow having to make a bed, something he is utterly and completely unqualified to do…We were planning on something like that because the broad had made it sound like the 5th Marines had held marching practice on it.
After making the delivery to 258 we went to 207, where the lady of the house pointed out two very minor stains: one on the comforter and another on a pillowcase, the latter one so minute we wondered if she had Superwoman vision because we could barely make it out…We breathed an internal sigh of relief (SOR) because this was easy to deal with: we removed the offending comforter and pillowcase, took them to the laundry room, and brought back replacements and at least the excursion allowed us to get our nightly hotel walk in, thereby saving valuable minutes later in the shift.
One thing I’ve noticed lately with both Gina and Kylie is not only are they not wearing uniforms (Kyle sometimes wears a shirt but usually doesn’t) but they’re not even meeting minimum front desk attire standards…This is a pretty casual town and front desk clerks everywhere tend to wear jeans and an appropriate top, but the two gals have been wearing sweatpants lately and tonite Gina had a t-shirt on and looked like she was dressed for a nite on the couch watching TV rather than serving guests.
I’ll tell you what, this is exactly like sports officiating: you have to look the part…Guests want to know at first site that you are an employee and are there to serve them and my own impression is sweats do not give this impression at all because a guest wants to be greeted by someone who doesn’t look ready for a nap.
The back office was a mess tonite, too…Combined with actually having to work right off the bat, this was bad for morale because we live in a pit and we don’t want to enter one at work…There were paper cutter remnants on top of the freezer, condiments on the back desk – both bottles and packets – and also on the back desk was a plastic bag of what looked like those things that attach to climbing walls so you can climb up…Exactly what those would be doing here – where we neither have a climbing wall nor have room for one – wasn’t clear and we weren’t curious enuff to make inquires.
We were up early today (see Sleep Log below) and – in a rarity on par with planetary alignment – we were feeling frisky and not in any particular mood to execute a patented Sparrow Roll Over (SRO) and get more sleep…We have some zero clue why, either, tho we did have some inspiration for a project we’re working on and that’s always tuff to ignore because your mind gets going and there’s not going to be any sleep to be had anyway…So we got up and went to the gym for a light workout because we were tired and there was no reason to push it and stopped at the convenience store for some coffee before going home.
The project work was frustrating…The inspiration was for the logo, where we wanted to replace the oval-ish background with one of a silhouette of the United States…That was easy enuff, and so was adding the other elements of the logo, but when we uploaded the pic to the site the shape was rounded, meaning the Pacific Northwest, New England, Florida, and the Southwest were distorted…This was because when the original pic was uploaded we chose the Rounded feature instead of Standard and Sparrow being Sparrow it took a while to figure this out, which regular readers of this crap will NOT find the Upset of the Year.
It took some trial and error, too, before we discovered this…At first we thought it was because the pic was too big and when that wasn’t it genius here decided the pic was cropped too close to the coastlines and that wasn’t it and we discovered the cause by sheer accident, right before we were about to stand up and stare at the computer crossly with our hands on our hips.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Saturday until 1330 Saturday…5.0 hours for the day – about half what we were expecting – and 47.5 hours for the week…We have no one to blame for this sub-50-hour total but ourselves, but we got done what we wanted to get done and that was satisfying, tho will be tired at the hotel later.
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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!
