Sure, Read Free Sunday’s a thing.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, September 2
The big news is we finally have a new GM at the hotel…His name is either Sperry or S Perry – there wasn’t an introductory email of course, the only ID we had was Chris’s instructions to add his email to our nite audit report distribution list – and we weren’t curious enuff to consult the internet on the matter…The hope, of course, is he has the good sense to leave a reasonably competent nite auditor who shows up on time every nite alone…Actually, he’s the GM of Hotel B, too, and his title is actually area general manager, so he’s unlikely to be spreading himself too thin by fretting over what happens on graveyard.
We emailed FDS Chris to see if we could delete the temporary GMs from the distribution list and, typical Chris, he was monitoring work email at home and he said sure, why not…We gathered that Chris had not received specific instruction on the matter, but we went and deleted them anyway, figuring if they missed them they’d let us know.
We were off for end of month, but curiosity demanded we check the numbers and they were strong, with revenue up $100K over last August…Occupancy, tho, was only up 200 rooms, which means the guests took in the shorts ratewise, the average daily rate (ADR; room revenue/rooms rented) at $181, up from $158 last August.
While the Friday/Saturday rodeos are done for the year, the big end-of-season bull riding blowout is Sunday nite and right after we took over a young cowboy with a really nice Texas drawl calls and asks for a room…We are far from sold out and an occupancy check shows that $200, plus tax, wouldn’t be unreasonable…He says sure and he and another kid – they could’ve been brothers – show up about ten minutes later…He is still being financed by his folks, tho, because after his debit card was declined he had to call them to get a little more put on.
Later, another cowboy came in, a tall, Black kid, who it turned out had flown in from somewhere and taken an Uber up here ($245), and he says he was staying with some other cowboys and he throws out two names, the first and last name of someone who turned out not to be in-house and the first name of the cowboy we had checked in earlier…Like others who try to stay on animals intent on bucking them off, he wasn’t too brite, because he asked for their room numbers and a key to the room…I told him we didn’t have the first name in-house, but otherwise, I couldn’t give out guest information, especially with only a first name to go on…He didn’t like this at all…He was supposed to meet them here and he was going to crash with them…They weren’t answering their phone, either.
Regular readers of this crap know policy here: one of the things you pay for is privacy and without instructions from the guest to give them a key, I can’t give the kid one…Then the kid said they’d been texting and he had the first name correct, so I made a motion with my hand, he gives me the phone, and the phone number on the text thread and the one on the folio match…All right, this isn’t enuff to give him a key to the room, but we feel OK dialing the room…No answer.
Well, now he’s really screwed because I’ve done all I can for him…You’ve got to admire a kid chasing bull riding dreams, so I tell the kid he can go sleep on the couch in the back of the lobby, tho there is liable to be an early wake-up call.
Then then were two calls for groups of railroad workers needing rooms until Sunday morning…The first was for three rooms and the second was for five rooms…These are not particularly difficult because when you create the reservation you can specify the number of rooms, so you only need to fill things out once, but you want to take care of workingmen showing up at zero-dark-thirty, so you check them in, printout registration cards, and make their keys, so they don’t have to wait…We did have a burst of genius, tho…The first three we set the rate at $324 plus tax for Saturday nite and then we had to go in and manually post the $200 for tonite, but for the group of five reservations we said eff this noise and made the rate $524 for checking at 0400 Saturday morning and checking out Sunday morning.
We were busting hump all nite: there was always something to do and a disturbingly high amount of it was hotel work and not our treasured project work…We didn’t get back from walking the hotel until 0230 and we don’t think we ever got the billing of departing room completely done, either…Plus, once we were finally caught up by 0600 or so both guests and morning coffee service (MCS) needed attention and we were so busy we didn’t even see Tammy come in to relieve us.
After a good rest (see Sleep Log below) there was more +1 strength in the gym and after four consecutive +1 workouts, we feel confident in calling the +1 workout the new regular workout…We know you do, too…The big news is we had the gym all to ourselves…Usually, a Saturday afternoon can be counted on to produce at least a handful of people enjoying themselves, but not today…They were all doing other things, meaning ol’ Sparrow was free to turn off that humongous tornado fan with impunity.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Sunday until 1630 Sunday…8.0 hours for the day and 50.0 hours for the week…We were pretty tired when we got home and thought there might be more there for us, but there wasn’t, which was OK because we were rested enuff for a strong workout and we accomplished what we wanted to on our bonus project work (BPW).
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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.
It was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
