It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, June 24
One of the benefits of working tonight – a night I usually have off – was being able to see Mark’s ink/highlighter combination on his Cash Drawer Spreadsheets (CDSS) and my suspicions that he rolled with a different combination on the night I’m not there were confirmed because while Mark used his semi-standard red ink for his name, he accented the day, date, amounts and the slash thru his name with yellow highlighter!!!…I am not making that up, he kicked it old-school with the first highlighter color ever.
We’ve been overdue for a delivery of sundry stand provisions for a while and now we are past overdue, we are desperate and neither Mark nor yours truly have any idea what the deal is…Perhaps there is a remodel they’re not telling us about and the sundry stand will be closed, tho I shudder at that thought as much as you do and as the nite auditor, I can vouch for the fact the hotel isn’t broke…Maybe Brandon and Q have gambled away the sundry stand funds or maybe the sundry stand elves have gone out on strike…All I know is there are empty racks in the refrigerator where there never was before.
There was pretty steady action all night…A lot of our guests are workers keeping odd hours or firefighters on shift work and it was rare when more than 20 minutes or so went by without a visitor.
One of them came at 0330 asking how to get out to our small-town airport to pick up a rental car…Ouch, that could be tuff…The local taxi company generally doesn’t go out there unless it’s a group order and while there are Ubers and Lyfts in town, there are only a few and good luck finding one on a Thursday morning because most of them have day jobs, preferring to drive on nites and weekends.
This guy is up a creek in other ways, too…He needs a rental because his truck broke down out on a US Forest Service road and the auto club won’t go out there because they’re ‘fraidy cats worried about animal attacks…Plus he needs a place to sleep tonite…We are sold out for the entire weekend and I checked for him and there was some availability in town tonight so he may not be sleeping in the park.
Not only are we sold out, but 88 rooms are also departing and there are 90 reservations for tonight and you don’t have to be Conrad Hilton to realize we are overbooked by two rooms…However, while processing the day’s registration cards it was discovered two of the reservations were hotel holds, a pretty standard procedure, so immediately we went from overbooked to spot on.
Over half of the arrivals are with a couple of baseball teams…They get special registration cards that were already printed out that includes both the amount of their deposit and their balance due and there’s an extra special line for their initials showing they acknowledge there are no refunds if they leave early…They also get a letter that more or less tells them to behave themselves…They seldom do – they are often a pain in the keister – but we try anyway and I gotta be honest, absolutely none of me is regretting that I will be out of town this weekend.
38.000000 MPG.
All right, while less than the 40+ of last time, this still isn’t too bad…There was still plenty of gas left in the tank, so maybe that had something to do with it.
The drive to the convention was OK…I half wanted to take the back way in, thru the center of the state, but I didn’t have unlimited time and, besides, it will make a splendid – a word we don’t toss out willy-nilly here – drive home Sunday morning.
I wanted to self-immolate after attending 2.5 hours of the state Legion’s executive board meeting today…Good gravy, that was boring, with most people talking way longer than mandated by the dictates of both decorum and personal interest…It got cantankerous at times, too, and I fled at 1530 because I had 1730 dinner reservations at one of my fave restaurants on the planet, the steakhouse at the 5-star restaurant here in town, and I still needed to check-in and shower.
(The meeting was so tedious I downloaded the Uber app, created an account, to include adding a credit card, and made a reservation for a 1700 pickup during one particularly dreary stretch.)
Dinner was wonderful and Miss Clarissa provided wonderful service…The only downside was I couldn’t finish everything, as there was prime rib, baked potato and onion rings leftover, stuff I used to be able to inhale with my eyes closed…It’s suspected months of eating two sacks of vegetables every day has made my stomach significantly smaller.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 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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