It’s Read Free Sunday (RFS) at The Diary.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, February 4
Boy, the front desk and back office were pigsties when we reported for duty at the hotel tonite, which regular readers of this crap know is rich coming from ol’ Sparrow, whose own house is a mess…The floors were dirty, there were pizza boxes in the back office, and the back desk had a box of hotel pens and key packets on it, plus Post-It Notes everywhere, not to mention dust and crumbs on the desk and keyboards.
This was too much even for us…We got a big green trash bag for the pizza boxes, put the boxes of pens and key packets in the server room – where they don’t belong, but they didn’t belong on the desk, either – and we even got one of the cans of air to spray the keyboard with…The floors could’ve used sweeping and vacuuming, but we didn’t want to go crazy and, besides, Javier the Porter would be in the morning and he gets paid good money to clean.
Gina said we had 116 rooms rented, one shy of a sellout…Regular readers of this crap know we get a sellout bonus (SOB) now, but we have to sell out before the nite audit is run, which could’ve presented ol’ Sparrow with a problem, because his treasured routine dictates the audit be run as soon as we can get to it…However, if we rent the room after the audit, and it was still pretty early in the shift, they would have a point noting that if ol’ Sparrow had shown some patience, perhaps they would’ve gotten the SOB.
Well, we don’t want to be pestered in this matter, so we switched the order we do things…Instead of doing the usual pre-audit crap and then running the audit, eating, and then diving in on the morning’s project work, we did the usual pre-audit crap, did project work, ate, and ended up running the audit at 0200, which no one can legitimately complain about…It was a nice compromise, very workable, and we noted in the logbook that we were one room shy of sellout and that the audit was run at 0200…Anyone who complains about that is whining.
We saw the first $600 rates tonite, too, three of them, and there were a dozen or so $500+ rates and room revenue was over $41K tonite and Gina said the absolute minimum we could rent a room for tonite was $350, but no one called to ask if we had anything available…159 called to ask where the trundle bed sheets were hidden and a travel agent called to confirm a reservation and that was it.
The big news is we put Spam in Spinach a la Sparrow tonite…I am not making that up…This was because the turkey bacon we’ve been test driving – and initially gave good reviews to – is turning out to be yucky…The Spam tho, worked pretty well and even bigger news is we found a hunk of bleu cheese in the freezer recently, thawed it out, and brought some of that in, too…Spam and bleu cheese, combined with the usual olive oil and seasoning produced a rather tasty meal.
For a while now the two boxes of coffee kept in the back coffee room – French roast and European blend – have been kept on the top shelf when they used to be kept on the middle shelf…I have no idea who was responsible for this change or even when it initially happened, but tonite – in a raw display of my authority as Nite Auditor – they were moved back to the middle shelf.
The problem, in addition to having to reach up to get packs of coffee, was that the boxes needed cuts in the front in order to access coffee packs and it was the cutting of these openings that was proving problematic, at least for ol’ Sparrow, because invariably we would either cut a slit in a coffee pack or, as likely as not, our hand and you’d hate to ruin a coffee pack or draw blood here…So we moved the boxes this morning because a new box of European blend had to be opened…Now, the top flaps of the boxes still need to be cut off, but we have a demonstrated history of cutting the tops of boxes without hurting ourselves, so this isn’t a problem.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Saturday until 2130 Saturday…12.0 hours for the day and 57.0 hours for the week…We cheated and took some cold medicine and as sometimes happens when we take cold medicine we woke up feeling like a ton of bricks had fallen on us…Good gravy, it was tuff getting up because the sinus problem still hasn’t gone away and the last thing we wanted to do was go to work, but we don’t work that hard, so what the hell.
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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!
