It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, October 21
It was busy for the first hour at the hotel tonite…There were people in the lobby – hockey parents – slamming cheap, canned beer while other hockey kids and parents were keeping the sundry stand hopping…Heck, we moved more popcorn than a movie theater, and those ice cream sandwiches with M&Ms in the cookies moved really well, too…We wanted to issue our warning about having sweets before bedtime but, prudently if you ask us, held back…Treats like this before bedtime might be a guilty pleasure reserved for time away from home.
Assistant Front Desk Manager Q was still here when the leader of the Lobby Cheap Beer Drinkers (LCBD) came over wondering where a trash can could be found…I told him to leave them, that I’d be happy to care of them, but he insisted…We went and got one of the 33-gallon bags and took it to the table where my line about making sure the cans were all empty – a pretty good line under the circumstances – drew no laffs whatsoever.
Q reported that while we were sold out our Sold Out Bonus (SOB) is not going to be all that much today, maybe $20 bucks or so…The problem is that both Head Housekeeper Gloria and Maintenance Guy Luke worked today, plus the average daily rate isn’t all that high because those bastards from the fracking company – who have several dozen rooms – are paying a discounted rate ($130, or so)…Q wanted to whine about it, but we told him, hardly for the first time, that it was better than nothing…Plus, without the frackers we wouldn’t have a SOB tonite in the first place.
Later, a guy shows up saying he needs to get into 219…His name and ID check out but the problem is the audit is running and we do not have System access…Then it occurs to us we could use the key program itself to make him one but he waves it off…Why is not immediately clear because he needs a key to open the door, unless he wants to wake his kid up and while he’s putting his ID back we see his room key.
– Uh, sir, that’s your room key right there.
He looks at it and nods.
– Yeah. I couldn’t get it to work…
This guy is not too brite…These are the absolute latest in hotel keys and they cannot get deprogrammed, so if your key is not opening the door, it is because you are unable to out the key up to the lock, which is not easy to do…So we head up with his key and my master key and his key opens the door without trouble…We avoid the urge to smack him and to call Child Protective Services to have his kid taken from him because of his dumbness.
And the remodeling of the gym is complete!!!…I am not making that up…All the new machines were up and running when we went to work out tonite…The only problem was the gym was packed, but we managed to get our new regular workout in.
The new Smith machine is pretty nice…There aren’t as many notches as the old one, but that’s a minor detail and, one other thing, the bar is attached to a cable, which is new, too…We’re not entirely sure why and some later research at the manufacturer’s website said the bar is “…counterweighted…reducing starting weight to 14 lbs” which we don’t understand at all but the weight we wanted to lift took more or less the effort we expected it to take, so what the hell.
We broke a machine, too…The leg curl/extension machine is in another room, so we did our squats first before diving in on that but some kids were working there, obliging us to wait a few minutes…We decided to give the new weight-assist pull-up machine a test run…We’ve used these before and we thought we had it all set up, but when we hopped on nothing moved and an inspection showed one of those deals that had pics of a locked lock and an unlocked lock and the bar was in the locked slot…So we attempt to move it to the unlocked slot but instead the bastard slams all the way over past the unlocked slot and now nothing will move…The pad you kneel down on is now perpendicular to the ground and everything is locked in place…Needless to say, ol’ Sparrow lacked the skills to fix it, the kids were done on the leg machine, and figuring we’d enuff damage for the evening the matter was referred to staff for further disposition.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0830 Saturday until 1730 Saturday…9.0 hours for the day and 52.5 hours for the week, both good totals…It wasn’t Sleep of the Year, tho…We were up after dreams more than we usually are and are dreams didn’t exactly take place at the end of the rainbow…They weren’t nightmares, but The Ex was in one where we left some stuff at a hotel and when we showed up at a baseball game the umpires made different calls on the same play and their uniforms weren’t straight out of the Umpire Handbook, either.
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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!