Q: Is it Read Free Sunday at The Diary of a Nobody?
A: Damn straight it is.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, May 15
Assistant Front Desk Manager Q had some news when yours truly reported for duty at the hotel tonight…One, to show he’s serious about dropping some weight – recall he proclaimed this last week – he announced he will be only taking his taxi as far as the base of the rather large hill he lives on top of…This is a significant concession on Q’s part, who’s also on record as pledging to return to the gym, tho he didn’t have any gym exploits to talk about today.
The second piece of news was pretty funny, as Q advised he was no longer keeping track of his monthly reward club sign-up totals…Instead, in deference to the fact he wins the rewards club sign-up race handily each month, he announced there is now an infinity symbol next to his name…This made me laff because Q can affect a pretty snobbish air at need and I went to the back office and checked and sure enuff, next to Q’s name was an 8 lying on its side.
Recall a couple of days ago I cleared out over 80,000 unread messages from my two Gmail accounts…Well, I went back in to check and clear out the new ones and good gravy, each one had over 40 emails, only a handful relevant…I went thru and checked the ones that were spam, then deleted the others that weren’t but didn’t demand attention and that left three that demanded immediate attention.
The first was from the site I did my taxes on saying the goddamned Feds had rejected my return…Crap…I’ve had this happen before and it was never good but I didn’t panic, resolved to finding out exactly what the deal was before jumping off the proverbial bridge.
Some research showed I’d enter the employer ID number (EIN) for the county incorrectly, putting four zeroes in a string that should only have had three zeroes…It took a bit to find the correct number out tho, because I didn’t have the county’s EIN handy…Google couldn’t provide it and I had just about resigned myself to stopping by the veterans service office (VSO) on the way home when it hit me it would be on last year’s return, so I logged on to the national tax chain’s site and retrieved it easily enuff.
There was also an email from a credit card I stopped using long ago that the automatic payments had evidently stopped on for some reason…Crap, crap…The balance had added up to $500 of all things, so I logged on and paid it.
(This would also explain all the Account Services calls I’ve been getting lately, calls I’d been ignoring.)
Then there was an email from Air Canada, the airline that was going to fly me to London last month, part of the vacation that was canceled…Regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall that ol’ Sparrow had been issued a credit for a future flight, but the email stated I was now entitled to a refund…Well, even tho I got a deal on the flight it’s still a decent refund – enuff to pay half of yesterday’s tax bill – so I got on the phone to Priceline, who I’d reserved with and they deserve props for not even giving the pretense of being able to take my call in a timely manner…Without even hassled with being transferred to a live human, I was told I would be called back in an estimated 2.5 hours…And, as it was, they did, but ol’ Sparrow was busy with a guest and couldn’t take the call.
The big news is Tammy didn’t relieve me this morning…(It turned out she didn’t make it in at all.)…About 0613 she calls me to advise she blew a tire and that she’d keep me posted…She added she’d tried to contact Front Desk Manager Brandon with no luck and I said don’t worry about it, when you get here you get here in good spirits…Tammy called a couple of more times with updates and about 0801 Brandon calls and says it will be a while before Tammy’s back on the road and he’d be in in a half-hour or so…When he came he added he might be here a while because Tammy reported after the tire was replaced she blew a second one for good measure.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1030 Saturday until 2030 Saturday, 10.0 hours for the day and a fine 48.5 hours for the week, a fine comeback after a slow start.
I’ve been field-testing a new sleep aid recently, a drink called SomSleep that advertises getting you to sleep within a half-hour and keeping you asleep…I first tried it a couple of nites ago and it didn’t really do too much, but that was before I bothered to read the directions and discover it is best served chilled…I did that today and while it didn’t put me to sleep within 30 minutes as advertised, but I did stay asleep very nicely…Of course, I did wake up to use the can but that was it, no waking up after a dream or at any other time…It was one hell of a rest.
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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