Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, March 21
The big news at the hotel is, predictably, they’ve started cutting hours and despite my international preeminence amongst night auditors, my Saturday shift (in Friday at 2300, out Saturday at 0700) will be given to Amy – who lost her PM shift(s) starting next week.
You can’t really argue with this because it’s good the hotel is staying open, at least until we’re all ordered to stay home in the next few days and aren’t making anything, but we will jump off that bridge when we get to it.
At tonight’s revenue figure, we might not be making our monthly nut until late in the month in April, if at all…Few people in-house at average, tho hardly rock-bottom, rates, is not good for the bottom line, but closing on our own could be bad because people might find other places to stay in the future.
I have to change my passwords here every three months or so, and tonight I was obliged to change the one required for access to the system and the ones for the programs to access reward club balances and the main computer log-in will have to be changed here shortly, too…I use the same password that got us into the doily dispensing machines (DDM) when I worked for the Doily Delivery Company up here a few years back, adding a character at the end…When I started here it was the exclamation point and I’ve been here long enuff now so that the end character is the “and” sign now…I could change the other two passwords now, I suppose, but I like the mental challenge of having to remember multiple passwords for a couple of weeks.
After a nearly two-week journey that took it from Tennessee to Mississippi then west to Iowa and then the big city AND THEN a return trip east that didn’t end until Connecticut – where it was presumably stopped from being put on a rowboat to Finland – my new business card wallet was at the hotel when I reported for duty….Recall I bought this last week, or so, to hold all my Sparrow For US Senate cards that I would be passing out the Minor Party state convention next month which, of course, has been canceled…Still tho, I put a few cards in there and both it and my real wallet are small enuff so both fit in my back pocket pretty easily.
The restaurant is still closed and on my off days we expanded our complimentary breakfast, which is now officially referred to as a “Grab ‘n Go” breakfast because the tables and chairs have been taken out of the lobby because, of course, we don’t want people sitting in the lobby breathing all over each other…There are two toasters out now, plus a rack of cereal that comes in their own individual bowls, bagels, those bite-sized pastries, fruit, assorted muffins and a refrigerator that has individual pints of milk and juices in them…I even completely lost my mind and put the individual cream cheeses on ice and I arranged it all in a manner I thought others would find logical and convenient.
Saul the Porter came in about 0515 and Tammy relieved me at 0700 and it hit me that in all the years I’ve been knocking around front desks this might have been the only time I did not see a guest…Now, here, it certainly has not been unprecedented to not see anyone from the time I take over until a porter shows up, but a guest always waddled in, either for coffee or to buy a breakfast coupon, but the only people I saw tonight were Assistant Front Desk Manager Devani, Saul and Tammy.
The first opportunity to test the new kitchen rug’s resistance to cat puke presented itself when I got home this morning, as the cat left a test case…Cleanup was a snap and when I woke up in the afternoon there weren’t any pesky, lingering stains and I was just glad the cat puked where I could see it.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0900 Saturday until 1300 Saturday…Don’t panic!!!…I woke up to use the can and when I crawled back into bed I decided that while I could’ve pulled a few more hours, I didn’t really want to…I didn’t really have anything in particular to do, but I wanted an afternoon up and to myself, tho there is hardly going to be a shortage of those coming up.
So it’s 4.0 hours for the day and a measly 37.5 hours for the week because whatever weekly figure I reported yesterday was out to lunch…For those of you keeping score at home, this is the first sub-40-hour week of the year since the last sleep week of April last year.
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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