Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, February 23
Boy, we were slammed at the hotel this morning…I didn’t get the drawers counted until almost midnight and I wasn’t done delivering folios to departing guests until 0230, about as late as it gets.
There were several arrivals…The first was this musician with a band who was playing in the music festival going on in town this weekend…Usually, when organizers rent rooms for bands and whatnot it goes pretty smoothly…Not this time…The only name on any of the rooms was the name of the band, not any of their members…Now, this really should not have been too big of a deal except the system read Joe Smith Band as Smith Band Joe, meaning Joe was the last name and I didn’t figure this out immediately, either, so the guy, a nice bloke who plays the banjo, was obliged to wait bit, which he took in stride…He travels a lot and said he understood, this was far from the biggest hassle he’s had on the road…The band’s room, tho, were already checked in so I had to check each registration card to see which didn’t have a signature and, therefore, was unoccupied, but after that, it was a simple matter to give the guy a key.
Thing was, he was accompanied by two groupies, a young couple, both drunk, the female half of which let it be known she sure could use “a bottle of whiskey”…Well, the bar was closed, hardly a surprise because regular readers of this crap will recall it closed well before midnight on New Year’s Eve…Anyway, they were telling this guy he was the greatest banjo player on the planet and we both took care to ensure they didn’t find out his room number.
Later, a girl comes up and announces she has a room reserved for her by the security company she works for…OK…The company has four rooms reserved and all four have names attached to them, none of them hers…I check the registration cards and two of the rooms are occupied and two are not, but I can’t very well give her a key to a room marked down for someone else…She takes this in good spirits and wonders if a call to her supervisor, who booked the rooms, might not help and I say “do it!” and the supervisor, Maddie, says the other two guys aren’t here and to give her one of the room and to top matters off she’ll be here in a couple of minutes…This presents another problem because she has another employee in tow and it’s a guy and both rooms have one bed and this won’t work…Turns out the two guys who checked in earlier should have been put in one room and Maddy goes outside and works her phone and a short while later waltzes in and announces everything has been squared away.
About 0300 157 calls to whine about some noise, he thinks from the room above, that is keeping him awake…These calls you must act on…It can be tough bothering people when you’re just starting out in the night audit racket, but it’s second nature now…The first thing to do is to determine exactly what’s going on, so I go and stand outside 257 and sure enough, it’s a group of guys being loud…I knock and everyone, as usual, immediately shuts up a phenomenon I still chuckle at and I am very nice and they are rather deferential, all but bowing, as if they were meeting the pope, and they immediately accede to my request for them to pipe down.
At 0430 the woman in 231 calls requesting a luggage cart be brought to her room…Oh, good gravy, what is this, the Ritz???…Sigh…I’m not paid to say no to these requests, tho, I’m here to take care of you, so I go and get one…231, it turns out, is occupied by a pretty woman in a business suit tho the skirt is rather short and she is not wearing hosiery despite the fact it is very cold out…I decline to say anything.
At 0650 – ten minutes before clock out – the phone rings…I stare at it crossly because calls this close to departure scare you…It could be someone wanting to book 20 rooms for a hockey team or a guest wanting something like, say, I don’t know, a luggage cart…Boo to those things, honestly…Fortunately, it was merely a guest with a question about our shuttle to the mountain.
Dinner tonight was a complete triumph…The Wife was busy while I slept, making a soup that had potatoes and rice and mushrooms and ground turkey meatballs that was first-rate…She combined what with a salad and baked salmon and it was the healthy dinner I’d requested when I got home this morning…She also cleaned the oven, commenting we were lucky there hadn’t been a grease fire.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 1800 Saturday…It is always a pleasure to rebound with a strong Saturday Sleep Session (SSS) after the now-usual Wednesday thru Friday fiasco…I slept straight thru, too, nine hours, no using the can…Well, I did wake up to turn the heater up…I sleep with the door closed so The Wife can putz around without waking we up, and the space heater was on low and it was really cold outside…Other than that, tho, I slept straight thru.
9.0 hours for the day winds up a pretty solid week, 47 hours, and for only six sleep sessions, too…It’s an hour more than last week, too, stemming the tide of four consecutive weeks of less sleep than the week before.
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.
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