It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, February 24
Mark used a yellow highlighter for marking his cash drawer spreadsheet (CDSS) at the hotel, but the big news – and it remains unclear if this will be a permanent change of policy or is merely a one-off, temporary deal – is that he used both red and blue ink to sign his name!!!!…I am not making that up…Red ink for the left drawer’s sheet, green ink for the right drawer’s sheet….
There was still the highlighter mark thru his name, which makes it look like a marketing logo, and some detective work shows there were company-provided red and green pens dispensed liberally at the front desk and Mark doesn’t keep a personal pen, so he probably merely used what was handy…Still, tho, you can’t help already marveling at the prospects for next week.
There was moderate phone action this morning at the hotel, including no less than three chats with the girl from the rewards club calling about 227, the guy who’s been here forever, who used to pay cash for his stay in the middle of the night and who now tries to use points to pay for a night every now and then…Evidently, there’s some question about when his rewards club points will be posted to his account, something yours truly has little knowledge of and even less interest in, and these chats were even more tedious than usual.
Recall the girl is based in Asia and English is her 17th language and her unfamiliarity with our inflections makes her sound like a snot at times and tonite she even kept rephrasing the same question over and over, probably because the overall situation confused her, and I suspect 227 said – or gave the impression that – he’s paid for the entire stay in cash, which he hasn’t but in which case would entitle him to have his reward club points posted to his account.
I checked for her and it showed he’d paid for Sunday nite – payment yours truly collected – which meant Sunday night was paid for, but Monday night was in arrears and room charges (no tax, he’s stayed here for so long he’s now considered a resident and is exempt) had yet to be posted for Tuesday….This confused her.
– He has paid for the entire reservation?
– No. Just for the first night.
– How many nights has he paid for?
– The first night. The night of the 21st.
– When will he pay for the whole stay???
Oh, hell, let me get out my crystal ball, here.
Then about 0100 a woman calls wondering if her reservation for two nights for arrival Friday has been canceled…I look it up and it hasn’t…Would you like me to cancel it for you???…There would be no charge…A decision was deferred until she and her husband bickered about it…The problem appeared to be the husband was cheap and not because they were broke, instincts that get honed over the years serving people…If they were broke they would have canceled the entire stay and not fret over how many nites to stay…Good gravy, this was tedious to listen to, a wonderful insight into the joy that must attend their marriage on a daily basis…As it was, I was obliged to provide exact figures for both Friday/Saturday and Friday and Saturday only stays before they decided to come up only for Friday nite.
The big news is we are out of replacement French vanilla creamer and are down to our final boxes of hazelnut and half & half…The only French vanilla creamers are the few that are in the coffee service rack (CSR) and there are so few yours truly was obliged to rearrange them so that there are only two rows of two stacks which, of course, obliged ol’ Sparrow to up the hazelnut creamers from two rows to three.
I don’t know who’s screwing this up…I wrote “creamer” on the whiteboard last week but BOOM no creamer yet…I both suspect and not suspect Assistant Front Desk Manager Q…Suspect, because ordering is a duty frequently passed off on hapless, newly promoted assistant front desk managers…Not suspect because Q is so thorough – he shreds Post-It Notes for Pete’s sake – it’s hard to believe he’d fall behind on something as routine as creamer ordering…Either way, we’ll see how this all plays out on my days off.
Slow at the Veterans Service Office today…Gary from the Legion called, but that was about it…He is another one who’s had a cancer recently presumed by the VA to have been caused by his Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam…He advised the cancer was cured long ago and he was wondering what he should do…Good question…The VA isn’t going to pay for something that’s been cured, of course, but if you put in a claim they’ll give you a 0% rating which means they acknowledge it is service-connected and if it comes back then they’ll start forking over.
Gary is also the Legion District 14 finance officer and our first meeting of The Virus Era is scheduled for April and elections will be held and Gary allowed how he wouldn’t stand in the way of someone else being finance officer…Good luck with that, because there hasn’t been a whole lot of interest in being a district officer in the recent past and I told him if I’m reelected by acclamation he will be, too, and he said laffed and yes, sir.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: Per standard Wednesday policy, there is no 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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