Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, March 11
Fresh off my triumph on Tuesday making the wake-up call greeting, I considered stealing Mark’s thunder and doing it again this morning…Mark, while a trusty desk clerk, plainly doesn’t have the Golden Tone Pipes yours truly has, but after listening to his performance I decided not to…Regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall that Mark only got into the wake-up call racket a few months ago and he only works two nights a week and I’d hate to harsh his gig destroy his morale.
Someone did some work and the folios from bookings we get from the ski resort’s central reservations office are all squared away…For a while they had been screwed up…Reservations like this where the guest pays a third-party usually generate two folios automatically: Folio 1 for guest incidentals, and Folio 2 for room and tax that either has been paid in advance or, as is the case of central reservations, are direct billed…For most of the winter, central reservation bookings have only generated one folio, obliging ol’ Sparrow to create a second one when billing them…The only fly in the ointment came when I didn’t immediately recognize it as central reservation booking and billed the guest’s credit card…This meant I had to refund the card, which isn’t that difficult but it does make it us look like a bunch of idiots who can’t bill properly.
Now, tho, we don’t even bother with the second folio because all central reservation bookings are automatically billed to a house account which is billed automatically at the end of the month…It doesn’t even show up on the folio.
Tyler the restaurant’s cook was in early today, about 0430, to prepare breakfast in the Champagne Room for the BBC crew…Recall he’s worn shorts and his restaurant hoodie all winter long and it looks like he’s gotten away with it without catching his death because temps are starting to warm as it was rather balmy freezing when he came in.
Recall sleep’s been tuff to come by this week for some reason, and I was debating whether to go in for a full day at the Veterans Service Office (VSO) or not but I felt good at the hotel and while I have the PTO, I decided to save it for another time.
There were three phone messages waiting for me at the VSO…Mr S, the vet who was a half-mile away from a nuclear test in 1950 called to request an appointment for Friday…When I called him back he said he had the paperwork we needed…Good…He’s been chasing this since 2005 and his case is rather involved and we aside all of Friday afternoon for this.
In the afternoon I get a call from Mr H…A while back we had filed a claim for a temporary increase to 100% disability while he recovered from knee replacement surgery…Mr H said the letter advised his claim was being denied because – and I am not making this up – because he was still in the service!!!…Again, I am not making that up: the VA thought this 60-something-year-old man was still in the Army…The official wording was “had not completed his active duty commitment” despite the fact he had done so 40 years ago and was applying for a temporary rating for a disability that had already been approved by the VA.
Now, regular readers of this crap know that sometimes veterans misread their VA correspondence so officially we’re taking a wait-and-see attitude, and Mr H said he’s coming in Friday morning to see what the deal is.
Steve came by, too…Steve used to be a pretty active member of the post but this was the first time I’d seen him in ages…He wants to file a claim on his ankle and for hearing loss, both of which became problems in the Gulf War…Some probing on my part revealed he also has knee and back problems that are not directly related to his time in the Marines but could well be secondary problems related to the ankle injury, which the VA also pays disability for.
I told him it appeared he had a pretty good claim…The VA pays disability for things that originally happened in the service and that are still causing problems, providing the current ailment can be traced to the original one, and I told him we will current diagnoses for everything he wanted to file for…Like others have been, he seemed disappointed I wasn’t able to sprinkle the VSO fairy dust and make these appointments happen for him, but it’s not my claim, it’s the veteran’s claim…I’m merely here to help file it and give whatever advice I can…He is also one of the great yappers in human history, interrupting me regularly and finally I had to show him a palm and ask him to let me finish.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: As usual, there was not any sleep to report today.
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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