Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Tuesday, August 27
Some laffs at the retailer tonight.
Early on a lady comes to the service desk…She needs help in the photo department and, as usual, there isn’t anyone in the photo department because we remain chronically shorthanded and the guy manning electronics also doubles as the photo guy…The lady then offers that while it is her name on the picture envelope she had just picked up, the pictures aren’t hers…I motion for her to hand me the envelope.
Have you looked at them???…Maybe they’re better than yours???
A good line – perhaps a Line of the Year candidate – and the lady gave it the laff it deserved…Then she hands me the envelope and says let’s find out and the next thing I know I found myself opening it…Some pics of some family on some outing involving water…I showed them to her.
Wow, they do look like they’re having fun…
She remained unpersuaded, however, continuing to insist on her own pictures…I have no idea if they found her pics, tho.
Later, I’m in sporting goods doing some go backs and Donna wanders by…Donna usually works in home lines and why she had wandered in sporting goods wasn’t immediately clear so I asked her if she was lost.
I’m looking for a place to lay down…I’m beat.
Donna is nearing retirement age and cleans houses on the side, or maybe she works the retailer on the side, I don’t know…But she looked beat and just as I’m about to something or other three assistant managers – Hadassah, Wes and Johnny – come barrelling thru the black double doors that lead to the back room…The timing was exquisite and some theme music would not have been out of place…It was so amusing, or I found it so amusing, that I chuckled to myself.
Donna, why don’t you ask one of our fine assistant managers where a good place to lay down would be…They really know the store inside and out.
She took me seriously!!!…I am not making that up!!!…I thought Donna would laff because she regularly laffs at my lame-o lines, but she didn’t…She actually asked the assembled assistant managers where she could go to lie down!!!…It was kind of funny, actually, and Johnny came back with a pretty good line, telling Donna to have Sparrow tell him where his fave hiding place is.
Later in the shift I’m heading towards auto parts and I turn the corner at cosmetics and there are two pretty girls there but I don’t recognize one of them – tho I should have – and I am about to walk past them when one of them yelps my name.
It took me a second because Nicole was wearing a stylish, red ball cap with her ponytail going thru the hole in the back…I know returning the gas cap to the shelf was important, but you would think I would’ve recognized Nicole…Regular readers of this crap remember her from her brief, illustrious career working before me at Hotel A…I relieved her on Friday and Saturday nights…She is funny and more thoughtful than most girls in their mid-20’s.
She’s working a couple of jobs in town that have better hours than swing shift and she and her roommate, Kimmie, were at the retailer looking for some stuff I know nothing about, tho that didn’t stop Nicole from asking if I had any toner recommendations, which forced me to admit I had some zero clue what toner was…Unless she meant ink for her printers, in which case she was on the wrong section, because printer ink is sold in electronics, not cosmetics…Even I know that.
Anyway, Nicole went on to describe toner for me…Evidently, you wash your face with it after you’ve washed your face in the shower, resulting in a very clean face…A small amount of personal vanity compelled me to note that I was getting a new smile in a couple of weeks.
It’s still summer but we’re pretty slow, because pretty much everybody is back in school…The retailer was slow tonight and Hotel B is about three-quarters full…It’s steady as she goes at the front desk, too…The printers still don’t work.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Tuesday until 1530 Tuesday…21 hours for the week, and I don’t have alarm clocks the next two sleeps so maybe – maybe – we could chase the elusive 50-hour mark.
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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