Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, September 22
And Sparrow’s new uniform shirt at the hotel is in!!!
As noted when the first samples started floating around the office last month, they’re pretty sharp: a white/lite gray check deal, button-up, including buttons on the collars and green piping down the front, on one side of the buttons.
Thing is, it’s a Large and not my usual 2x…God bless the manufacturers…I’d heard over the years that women’s clothiers have long marked labels down a size or two – “Oh look, madam is down to a 17!” – and it is nice to see us gents getting the same treatment.
Still to come are the rumored gray sweaters…I have a lot of experience wearing uniforms and gray-on-gray would not be my first choice, but I am not the decision-maker here, I merely wear the results…And a sweater could make me look like Ward Cleaver with the only thing missing being a pipe.
Sold out tonight and there were the usual phone calls and walk-ins requesting rooms and the nite audit took a while because there were no less than eight arrivals waiting when I came in and six of them came in consecutively right after I favored the front desk with my presence…One almost caused a problem.
She came in an announced she was a corporate lodging guest…That’s the 3rd party some companies use for their workers on the road…They get a $90 rate year-round and I forget the number of room nites we’re guaranteed, but the number isn’t low…Anyway, she presents her card and it’s in her bosses name, not hers…Sigh…I decided to check her in…This isn’t straight out of the Front Desk Handbook, but I’m paid to wing it and I seem to remember this happening in the past with someone else and there weren’t following instructions not to do this again…She signs the registration card, I make her keys and she’s happy to be going to bed…She’d worked all day in the big city and the drive up was long, with everybody getting out of the big city, too.
The problem came when I went to check her in on the corporate lodging website…I entered the card number and it was declined.
Fabulous…A card declined from someone whose name isn’t on the card in the first place…This could cause real problems for ol’ Sparrow because part of my job is to ensure payment is guaranteed for guests before they are checked in.
I had written the card number down so I didn’t have the card with me and I thought f*ck, I’m going to have to call her, probably wake her up, and have her bring the card down…I entered the number again and it was declined again, and the screen invited me to call an 800 number for assistance…So I did…I read the number to Jaqueline and I could hear her shrug and say this was a valid number, there was no problem on their end, so ol’ Sparrow enters the number again, painstakingly fretting over each number like an imbecile and BOOM it’s accepted this time.
Problem averted.
(Almost interesting is that in this the end of the second decade of the 21st-century, we still have to out their corporate lodging card in a plate with one of those credit card receipts from the 20th-century and get an imprint, to send into the corporate lodging home office…By mail.)
My new knit cap made its debut this morning…Recall I snuck it in on The Wife’s birthday shopping spree earlier this month…It’s mostly dark gray with a red swatch that has some gray stripes on it…The big reason I bought it is it covers the ears all the time…It doesn’t ride up ten seconds after putting it on…It was in the 30s when I headed home, cold enuff for knit cap, but it was in the 50s when I headed in from The Shire, which hardly warrants a knit cap, so I wore the usual ranch hat in.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Saturday until 1600 Saturday…7.5 hours for the day and a splendid 54 hours for the week…It’s the second 50-hour week of the month and the highest weekly total since at least July of last year!!!
I’d like to thank the members of the academy, my agent and the good folks at Zzzz-Sleep for all their support…God bless all of you.
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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