Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, September 14
Swamped at the hotel tonight…Between arrivals and walk-ins (we had ten rooms available) and sundry stand sales I didn’t even get the drawers counted until 0030 and I didn’t return from delivering folios to departing rooms until 0300, the latest time in the memory of man.
We’re pretty squared away here and there are seldom problems but we had one tonight…I checked a man and a woman into 104, a room with one king bed…A few minutes later she comes back, with her bags, and announces that while she loves her brother dearly, she does not want to share a bed with him…She added they had reserved a room with two beds…I checked the registration card and indeed they had, but someone had overridden this and assigned them a room with one bed…We got off easy, because we had the room they reserved available.
Then, about 0245 and right about as I am about to shove off, finally, to deliver folios a guy calls all but panting asking if I have a room and let me tell you, he was so anxious to get laid he let out a sigh of relief when I told him I had one for only $199, plus tax…Hell, I could have tacked on a Get Some surcharge of a couple of hundred bucks and gotten it…He said he’d be “right over”.
I went and got started on delivering folios anyway because I’ve learned over the years that people do not always show up…I transferred the phone to the front desk mobile and turned the sign over, which gave people a number to call…He never called and I got folios delivered in about 25 minutes because there were a lot of checkouts.
The guy and his mate – there is no other word for her – are waiting at the front desk…Neither had a working phone, which made me feel bad because now ol’ Sparrow was responsible for delaying nature from taking its course.
The big news is I knew the woman!!!…I am not making that up…A bit younger than me but well older than her the kid…I glanced at his ID after he offered it and he was 28, hubba-hubba…I gave no sign that I knew her and she was demure but we both knew: she would be breeding with her young buck soon enuff…Then he offered his debit card, which is a violation of some bylaws whos jurisdiction I used to fall under and I really wanted to take the young(er) man aside, put an arm on his shoulder and say look, son, the older broad pays for the room but I didn’t.
Stanko and Hal, our new post commander, picked me up at the hotel for the two-hour trip to our district meeting at 0730…It was a long day…Four hours on the road round trip and a four-hour meeting, and I started to feel it about 1400 or so when I started getting testy because nobody could make their point in under ten seconds…I have no one to blame but myself for this, of course, because as district commander I am ultimately responsible for when and where meetings are held…I want to meet at oh-dark-thirty at the retailer’s parking lot, then every swinging dick in the district will be at the retailer’s parking lot at oh-dark-thirty…As it was, I decided to form an exploratory committee, consisting solely of me, to look into the possibility of having future district meetings in my living room.
I almost screwed up…It’s 1000 or so, a half-hour before go-time, and I can’t find my sheets that have the order of ceremonies, what yours truly calls rituals, anywhere…It’s a sheet I made up when I was first elected post commander years ago and I couldn’t find it because I didn’t bring it…This could cause real problems because the rituals that begin any Legion meeting are important, but it’s the end of the second decade of the 21st-century and forgetting something like this is no big deal…I found a computer, googled the Legion post officers guide and BOOM, was able to print what I needed in short order.
Then no one had a gavel for me…Usually, Stanko brings one, but he forgot, Duane, our host, said their’s broke, so he went outside and got me a rock to use…A pretty good one, too…It felt good in the hand and made the requisite noise and did its work well.
Hal almost got us killed, too…We were pulling out onto the highway and Hal looked right and I know he saw the black car that wanted to turn into the driveway we were pulling out of, but he forgot about it…The black started to make a left turn as Hal confidently pulled out into traffic…The driver of the black car wasn’t paying any more attention than Hal was and it was only my alert yelling at the top of my lungs that prevented a collision, which would have hit yours truly squarely because I was in the back passenger-side seat.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1830 Saturday until 2147 Saturday…3.25 hours, a good nap but I needed a full rest…This is hardly the first time this has happened, tho, and I’m used to it.
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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