It’s Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary. Enjoy.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, June 12
Amy was not in good humor tonight when yours truly reported for duty at the hotel…Amy is on record as not being pleased with the results of the tech refresh, especially how some reservations don’t get uploaded in a timely manner, tho I haven’t heard Q or Mark whine about this.
Anyway, the problem was a reservation that came thru for one of our king suites, a category which we happened to be sold out of because it turned out Amy upgraded someone, apparently – and hilariously – at the time the reservation was made online…Amy said we could put them in a room with queen beds and Amy seemed to think this problem was insurmountable and told me to call her when they came in and I said no, I wasn’t calling her and she persisted and I ended up telling her no means no, I wouldn’t be bothering her.
Well, this certainly could be a problem, but certainly nothing ol’ Sparrow hasn’t handled dozens of times over the years…And further investigation showed that while we didn’t have a king suite available, we did have a queen suite available, which has a pullout couch in the living room…Not exactly what they reserved, but an apology and a gracious explanation will often quell troubled waters and nobody does an apology and gracious explanation better than ol’ Sparrow…It’s possible some hack at the Beverly Hills Hotel might do it as well as I do, but it is simply not possible to do it better…As it was, this talent went unused tonight because the guest no-showed, which reinforced the old hotel lesson about not jumping off bridges before you get to them.
I was getting back from walking the hotel and I saw an older gent at the front desk and it turns out he needs a room for the nite…All right, the system wants $250 for tonite but he has a 101st Airborne hat on, so I slash that to $200, plus tax…Then he pulls out his retired military ID and requests a military discount and I say sure, and immediately trim another $25 off and then – and this was pretty funny – he pulls out AARP and auto club cards and asks for further discounts, which led to a Line of the Year candidate for ol’ Sparrow:
– Oh, sir, we can’t keep compounding discounts like this…
– Why not???
– Well, eventually I’ll owe you money…
He didn’t really see a problem with that, but I held the line at $175, plus tax.
Then at 0200 a lady calls asking for a quote and I trot out the usual for tonight, $200, plus tax…She hems and haws a bit and then talks it over with her husband and says no and is off the phone before I can even ask what would it take for her to book right now because, you know, it’s zero-dark-thirty and you’re trying to move some product.
She calls back a bit later, tho, and says they’re on their way…It turns out they took their dog and 16-month old rugrat camping and neither was turning out to be all that pleased with the excursion…After checking them in I’m delivering their requested Pack-N-Play to their room and you can hear the dog barking and the baby crying and the husband answers the door and he already looks haggard and it’s not even 0300 yet…All of this made me glad I’m alone right now and have never reproduced because you don’t have to be Dr Phil to know he’s probably not getting much sleep tonight.
The big news is the scratch paper pile is right where I left it Wednesday morning…Recall the tech refresh eliminated its traditional place on the monitor stand and without the monitor stand yours truly had placed it next to the telephone stand…Well, some rascal and dayshift didn’t like this and moved it on the new monitor’s base, a lousy place to put it because I use the base for keyboard storage at times during my night’s labors…As a compromise, I put next to the monitor base, between the base and that metal desk organizer deal…This location obviously found favor with the Dayshift Gods, because the pile was still there.
The new guy’s wake-up greeting was there from yesterday when I checked it…It was, frankly, weak…It was rambling, saying how gorgeous it was going to be in town today and how great it would be to get outdoors and how great the restaurant is…Jesus H, he did everything but include the latest from the hockey playoffs.
Friends, you do NOT want to waste a guest’s time, especially one who’s groggy from just waking up…Good morning, ID yourself and the briefest of weather reports, and a thank you for staying with us…Twelve seconds tops…You do not want to go passing judgment on things because there might be guests who think sunny skies and temps in the 80 is lousy weather.
Legion District Commander Sparrow presided over the installation ceremony for post officers today…The ceremony was at the VFW downtown, which still hasn’t been completely rebuilt following the smoke damage from the fire in the neighboring restaurant a year-and-a-half ago…Or what used to be the neighboring restaurant…It hasn’t been rebuilt, either…Evidently, there was/is some insurance company squabbling that had to go to an arbitrator, but it was suitable for our ceremony.
Longtime readers of this crap will recall yours truly instituted the installation ceremony a few years ago because I wanted being a Legion officer to mean something more than being merely a name on a form…The only fly in the ointment is the ceremony really hasn’t caught on…There were a couple of post members there but not even every officer was there, for Pete’s sake, and it even included a potluck lunch…I think part of the problem is Stanko’s insistence on having it on a Saturday afternoon, a time when a lot of people are doing outdoorsy things…I personally think having it on a Thursday meeting night might be nice, but I’m only district commander, a guest of the post, really, so what do I know???
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1600 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…5.5 hours for the day and 43.0 hours for the week, a figure that should make all of you weep and rend garments…Umpiring Thursday and today’s installation ceremony are to blame, of course, but the good news is there should be no shortage of sleep Sunday, which will get the new sleep week off to a solid start.
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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