Editor’s Note: Diary entries may be a bit shorter on occasion while Gaylon works on a project
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, January 24
Big News Central
The big news is yours truly was late reporting for duty at the hotel tonite…I am not making that up…Two minutes to be exact.
We left at a good time, but snow started falling – a rare enuff occurrence this winter – on the drive in and was coming down good enuff to slow the roads down…Plus, we had to go to the retailer to get provision for the next couple of nites…So we clocked in a couple of minutes late…Robert was staying until the bottom of the hour, tho, so we didn’t hold him up.
Even more big news is the heat in the lobby and back office back on, too…Finally…Robert had it set to 75, which is a bit much, but too much heat is better than too little heat…There was a note on the thermostat, too, advising that anyone desiring a heated lobby would do well to keep the thermostat on “FAN” and not “AUTO”…Being desirous of a heated lobby and back office, we complied, tho we did turn the temperature down to 70.
The Front Desk God giveth, but they also take away, and Roberto announced the right work station’s printer was not working at all…For the past month or so, it only spit out paper out the back, with the door open, but that was sort of workable if you were only printing out a couple of sheets…Robert said Pierro caused a paper jam, leading Roberto to pull out the roller, tho what made Robert the printer tech is not clear, and when he replaced the roller, the whole machine was kaput…You can work around this by printing to the left workstation – or the back office, for that matter – but it’s a modest hassle.
Later, 201 called to advise the room above him featured kids “stomping” around in the room above him and could we tell them to “knock it off”…Well, those keeping score at home know we don’t have a third floor here, which really confused the gent, but there as little we could do there because, well, there isn’t a third floor…Offhand, three things appeared possible:
- 201 is either hearing things or is crackers;
- There are critters in the attack;
- 201 is staying at the Express, and called us by mistake.
- The hotel is haunted.
The morning-line fave is #3, tho we’ve run into #2 before, tho critters tend to “scurry” and not “stomp”…#1 is also possible because one of the things marriage taught me – after we are never going thru this again – is that you can never be certain what someone else is thinking.
Longtime readers of this crap, however, know that you dismiss the prospect of #4 at your peril…The old maintenance guy, Luke, had his theories on the matter, which we dismissed until we had an incident of our own a few years back…Recall we were working a missing persons case with the fuzz, and we’re in the parking lot behind the restaurant, and the officer says he sees someone in the fitness center…The lights were out and they have motion sensor activation (MSA), so the only way someone could be in there was if they didn’t set the sensor off!!!…So #4 is always in play to explain things here.
After that, the phone rings…We try to pick up in the back office, but the new, 21st-century phone is on the wrong screen for that and we were unable to move it, and by the time we got out front, the phone had stopped ringing…It turned out be 911 dispatch, and a bit later Officer Haley – who we know from the hospital and for whom ol’ Sparrow will get down on all fours and bark for – sashayed into the lobby announcing there had been a 911 hangup from here.
Sigh…We had to tell her the new phone system does not provide an alarm when a room dials 911 – a major discrepancy – so we have no idea who made the call…We walked the hotel, tho, just to make sure no one was passed out in the hallway, or a wing wasn’t burning down, and didn’t see anything.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log
1030 Saturday until 1730 Saturday…7.0 hours for the day, a good tho hardly great total, and 53.0 hours for the week, a more than satisfactory total…After the horrors of the past few weeks, with even odder hours than we usually keep and sub-50-hour sleep weeks, it’s nice to be back to normal…God bless all of you.
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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.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
Click here to get to know Gaylon’s latest book: The Life 101 Project.
