Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, June 17
I was busy all night at the hotel.
First, between arrivals and my own personal dilly-dallying, I wasn’t done delivering folios until 0200, a lousy time even in ski season…This only gave me three hours of farting around time for project work because from 0500-0700 I was again running around, both with the usual 0500 stuff – morning coffee service. the housekeeping report, registration cards and whatnot – and pesky guests wanting to checkout or otherwise bother me…I was so busy I wasn’t even able to spend the last half-hour at leisure, with coffee, on my fave lobby chair…There was always something to do, like tend to morning coffee service or what we’re passing off as a complimentary morning meal.
About 0130 I had a foreman check in the six rooms reserved for him and his crew…It was thru the corporate lodging folks, so I had to make an imprint of his corporate lodging card – just like the full-service gas stations did growing up – and then
Fortunately, I had already checked them in and Mark had made their keys, so all he really had to do was sign six registration cards…Since it was a corporate lodging booking I also had to check them in on their website and since I wasn’t able to check them all in under his, name I had to make up names…Some front desk workers will put in the names of people they know in cases like these, but I’ve never been able to do this, so I made up names as I went along.
Then 140 called and, evidently thinking checkout time was three in the morning or something, wondered if he could get a late checkout, “say 11 or so”…I chuckled to myself because 1100 is the usual checkout time and resisted the urge to charge him a few bucks for the privilege of checking out at the usual time.
Still, tho, it’s good to be busy…Room revenue was over $7,500 tonight and we had 78 rooms occupied, totals to sneer at during a normal summer, but both are Virus Era highs…There were phone calls, too…One gal wanted to know “how open” we were and I told her pretty open, we could take all bookings with no restrictions and another guy had nothing better to do in the middle of the night than call and ask if our pool was open.
My pocket knife was useful again, opening another sack of oranges, a package of napkins – admittedly a bit of overkill – and helping to break down a box that had held assorted brands of cereal.
The knife also played a key role in disposing of 24 expired individual cartons of milk that were in a crate in the back office coffee room…I meant well…I thought there is no reason to throw out 24 cartons full of milk, even small ones, because eventually the milk will spill and make a mess…Perhaps it would spill in the county dump, but maybe not, and I would hate for someone to have to deal with it.
So I started in opening them the traditional way and after two cartons decided this would take forever and I stood there staring at them crossly with my hands on my hips and decided to slit an opening in the top…Enter the knife…It cut two dozen slits in short enuff order but I made a mess emptying the first one, milk squirted out to places I’d rather it hadn’t, but I couldn’t very well toss out cartons with slits in the top…So, after again considering matters with my hands on my hips, I put a second slit in the top, to vent the air…At first, this produced only modest results, but then I dug my fingers in and further tore it apart, which worked OK, except for when the milk had curdled, which was smelly and got my hands dirty besides…This required a washing, of course, and also a lotion application, because the soap dries my hands out…Fortunately, there’s no shortage of lotion at a hotel front desk.
After the go-go bustle of the hotel, it was nice to retire to the relative tranquility of the Veterans Service Office (VSO)… I had a couple of messages from people I’d sent discharge papers requests in for saying they hadn’t heard anything and some research showed the records center in St Louis is not dealing with routine requests right now, only emergency records requests from the homeless or disabled or something similar…Neither was particularly pleased with this and one tried to get snitty, but my relentless graciousness prevailed.
The checkbook balanced again and it’s to the point where far from marveling over this like I used to when I returned to being responsible for my money again I am wondering why there was so much trouble with this back in the bachelor days…Still tho, it’s nice to have a handle on things, and my Blow Fund, aimed for a Queen Mary 2 crossing to London next year, is on schedule.
Towards the end of the VSO shift, I started getting delusions of grandeur about having a pizza for dinner…I haven’t had one since the $5 frozen pizza from the retailer I snagged the day The Ex pulled out of town and regular readers of this crap know there are some options, but not many since our small town diner closed…Then I ended up investigating making my own, folly if there was one, of course, but the pics, especially of my fave Stromboli, were very appealing with the recipes assuring any idiot could be Mr Italia in less than an hour.
Regular readers of this crap know I have few kitchen skills and the prospects of me producing a tempting Stromboli are few, so I deferred the matter for later in the week, choosing instead to go to our small town market for some of their orange chicken but they were out of that so I got some hot dogs.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: As usual for Wednesday, there is no sleep to report.
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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