It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Tuesday, January 10
On arrival at the hotel, Chris said he had both good and bad news for us.
First, he gave the good news: we were sold out and everybody was in, a great way to start any nite…Then he went into the back office, came out with a wad of receipts from the restaurant, and informed us of the bad news: us nite auditors had new duties.
Crap…I was afraid this was going to happen, and Chris had been, too…What you do is take the day’s restaurant receipts, sort them by payment type – credit card, cash, room charge, what have you – and then do some other stuff…Chris explained it thoroughly and even left some scribblings on a Post-It Note for further guidance, but when it came time to do it ol’ Sparrow couldn’t get past sorting the receipts; everything else had been forgotten.
Per standard Sparrow policy (SSP), we assumed blame for this failure in an email sent to all concerned…We apologized for our glaring failure at this vital new task, advised it had not been completed, and requested written instructions.
There was nothing to apologize for, of course, even for someone with 13 years of Lutheran schooling…The days when ol’ Sparrow could receive verbal instruction in rather detailed auditing procedures and later perform those tasks – if they ever existed in the first place – are long past…Hopefully, there will be something in writing tomorrow nite or, better yet, the new management company’s accountant who’s still here, will come by and show me.
In Morning Coffee Service (MCS) news, two coffee pots are missing…We strongly suspect they were taken out of service, an economy to prevent wasted coffee which, frankly, we have our share of here…(This morning we poured out two full pots.)…Up until now, there’s been six coffee pots – three each for French roast and European blend – and two water pots and on sold-out or otherwise busy nites, we’d make all six pots…The coffee stays hot forever and this is less that dayshift has to fuss around with.
Two pots is actually a good call, tho…It’s not so busy that one of the two dayshifters can’t break away to make a pot of coffee and there will be both coffee and water saved and that’s a win for the environment.
In still more coffee news, the restaurant’s coffee machine is down…One of the guys came over about 0600 advising us of that and requesting to use our coffee machine.
It wasn’t easy…Their pots are significantly bigger than ours and, initially, didn’t fit under our coffee maker, leading yours truly to suggest the base might be removable because the pot is designed to be placed into service in a public area…This turned out to be the case and while it fit under the coffee maker, it didn’t go all the way in and the spout wasn’t reaching the pot…The guy then had the brilliant idea of removing the top and BOOM that worked.
(The guy said the problem some moisture got into their machine’s computer, which shut down the whole unit…Someone was supposed to be by later today to look at it.)
The problem is our coffee machine makes about a third of what the restaurant’s machines produce…Plus, it’s not as if you can brew one pot after another; it takes eleven minutes total for the coffee to brew and the pot to heat up more water…This means it takes over a half-hour to brew one restaurant pot…Not only that, Rotary had their Tuesday meeting scheduled for 0700 in the Mountain View Room and who knows if he was able to make enuff for both Rotary and restaurant customers.
More snow!!!…I am not making that up…We’re not even going to whine about having to shovel the berm because it’s habit now.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1230 Tuesday until 2130 Tuesday…9.0 hours for the day – a disappointing figure, frankly – and 23.0 hours for the week.
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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.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!