It’s Read Free Sunday at The Diary. Enjoy today’s entry with our compliments.
Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, December 19
Nicole the WunderClerk was there when I reported for duty at the hotel tonight…I would like to report that – based on her triumphant first couple of weeks here – that all guests were in and the lobby was sparkling clean, but she actually had a mistake to tell me about.
Seems a lady who booked a room for Saturday night and paid for it thru a third-party wanted to arrive tonight…Well, this can certainly be done, however, you cannot merely add a night to the original reservation…This is because the guest paid the company and the company is paying us via a virtual credit card and you can’t tack another night onto that…You need a new reservation to accept the other form of payment…As it was, she said Brandon had told her about her error – probably the only one she’ll make here – and that he said it would be OK to cancel the reservation if she didn’t show up, which I ended up doing.
About midnight I hear some scurrying in the lobby and I head out and see two of our fine local constables wandering around, plainly looking for something…I ask what they need and they say they’re looking for room 202…I tell them to go thru both doors and make a left and take the stairs up and as they are heading there I ask if I may be of service, which is a polite way of asking what in the fuck is going on because while it is possible – hell, likely – that yours truly will be some zero value on this call, it would be nice to know what the deal is…They declined to tell me, tho that didn’t really matter because right then an ambulance and fire trucks started pulling into the driveway and you don’t have to be Joe Friday to deduce they were called by someone in 202.
I do spring into action, tho…It’s unlikely the paramedics will want to lug stretcher upstairs, so I go out and tell them the nearest elevator is down where the two wings meet and they like me to meet them there and open the door for them so they don’t have to waste time walking down the hall???…Of course, they would, so I reenter the hotel because it’s 13 degrees out and scoot down the hall to open the door for the paramedics.
We get to 202 and the cops are talking with a young thin kid and holy moly, you could smell the booze two doors down…Outside of being groggy, the guy didn’t appear to be ill but after asking him some questions they put him on the gurney and transported him to the ER and I didn’t hear anything more about the matter.
Despite the fact business is down, there was the annual Christmas card from Scott the owner in my box and it included the annual C note, too…Not only that, the restaurant included a $100 gift card for there, too, which is a first and really sweet…Or will be once the restaurant opens for dining in again and I can be bothered to go to it.
I don’t know what I’ll blow the C note on this year…I try to use it for something I need and some might recall I blew last year’s C note on a new pair of really suh-weet winter gloves…In fact, the gloves cost $99, obliging ol’ Sparrow to supplement the purchase with a few bucks of his own to pay for the tax…Nothing is asserting itself right now, tho.
Today is the one year anniversary of ol’ Sparrow being the first customer at the new convenience store in town…Regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall that I was heading to the gym about 0500 or so and saw some activity in there, so I drove up and saw the sign: opening at 0600…Well, I decided right then to be the first customer so I went and shortened the workout a bit so I could be there by 0545, parked right in the front door and when others showed up I went and stood at the door…When they opened the doors I went to the nearby muffin rack and even had time to spare because the idiot at the other register need cigarettes.
I still feel rather possessive of the store and from time to time will note to whatever cashier is helping me that I was the first customer, 47 seconds after opening…They receive this information with tolerance and don’t seem particularly impressed.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1500 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…6.0 hours for the day and 44.0 hours for the week, better than last week’s distressingly low total of 40.0, but still less than we’re looking for.
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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