Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Tuesday, July 23
Amy was in for night audit training tonight…I know all of you remember Amy from her disastrous tour as GM at Hotel B last year…It wasn’t her fault, of course…As I’ve noted here Jesus H Christ Himself would have had a difficult time flourishing at Hotel B…She’d had some night audit training under Q on my nights off (yes, she did witness the stabbing and yes there will be further details coming up) and she’s had plenty of front desk shifts, which I didn’t have, so we were not starting from scratch.
Despite training, and having a couple of arrivals, we still had everything done before 0100, which is a pretty good time for a sold out night, only about 10-15 later than had I been doing myself, and you can’t ask for more than that here.
Amy was training under Q the night of the stabbing and had still more details about the matter…Evidently the slashing – you can’t really call it a stabbing, evidently – happened right in front of Q, a change from my original report that had Q coming around the corner when it happened…In fact, Amy said Q had to back himself up against a wall to avoid running into the happy couple and the slashing happened within a foot or two of him…As noted, this was Q’s first stabbing and caused no small amount of trauma and he wasn’t much good the rest of the night…Amy, for her part, lives in the next county and apparently sees stabbings left and right, and she actually related her story with some glee.
About 0130, a guy came in looking for a room…Amy went out and told him we were sold out and then went above and beyond and started scoping out online if there were any rooms in town…The only problem with this is at oh-dark-thirty websites are already listing availability for Tuesday night, not tonight…So, when it said Hotel B had availability, Amy sent him over and they were sold out…So he came back…Amy spent a lot of time farting around with him, way more time than I would have, frankly, and it was plain the guy would not have dismissed out of hand us letting him stay in our lobby, but Amy handled that well and we ended up calling him a cab.
Amy was out front when the crew came by for 0400 muster…I don’t do that..Now, it is a time-honored front desk clerk instinct to be at the front desk when the lobby is occupied…It’s a good instinct, frankly, but with the 0400 crew I don’t bother…Their coffee service is ready and if they need me they know they can ring the bell…As it was, the crew consumed almost a pot of coffee this morning but the big news the favored creamer today was half & half…I am not making this up…French vanilla got some modest action, but hazelnut, usually a 0400 bellwether, got no action at all.
Later, I showed Amy a time-saving tactic when looking up a guest’s reward club point balance…The way Q had showed her, and me when I started, involves opening up the reservation, copying the member number, then going to the reward club program, pasting the number, then hitting enter…You then write the reward club level and the point balance on the key packet …This method is completely whack.
The Sparrow Method, which is a lot faster, skips opening the reservation…You go straight to the rewards club site and manually enter the membership number, which is found on the registration card…This saves you several minutes when you have 40 incoming guests.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Tuesday until 1900 Tuesday…9.5 hours for the day and 23.5 hours for the week…Good gravy, this is the highest Tuesday total since the last week of March.
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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