It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Thursday, May 29
We headed in early to the General Hospital Security Department (GHSD tonite because we had three stops to make: the health food store, the grocery store, and the retailer…At the health food store we got some of that green powder that has eliminated the trots and has us crapping regularly, within a half hour or so of getting up, before we head out on our walk.
At the grocery store we got provisions for the next two nites at GHSD, a haul which included a $1 plastic plate, made necessary because the paper plates in the ER break room annoy me because when you scrape melted cheese off of them, you get no small amount of paper with your gooey, coagulated cheese, a horror on par with war crimes…This withdraws all the joy from scraping cheese off a plate…At the retailer, we got a tub of vanilla protein powder.
None of this took as long as we thought it would, and we were at GHSD 40 minutes early, where we were met by someone we’ve never seen before…This always keeps you on your toes, of course, but it turned to be Darrin, a traveler from The Springs…Hunter was working swing shift, too, which meant there were three people in our small office for a while.
Let me tell you something, it’s funny how life works out if you let it…There is a pretty cute Latina cleaning woman we see from time to time, usually working the far side of the facility…We heard she’s looking, too, because someone who thought we’d care told us she asked about The New Guy (TNG) back when he was here…We laffed because TNG is really ugly, but knowledge that a pretty girl is looking is always filed away.
Tonite, answering to Mother Nature’s mandate that we reproduce, we were determined to say hi to her…Her name’s Karla, a tidbit we came by by stalking, I mean information aggregation…One of our security apps is for making temporary badges, and it includes a useful feature where you can see who is using their badge to open doors and you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to put this to use.
Anyway, we’re on our tour on the far side and don’t see her so, just for funsies, we head outside and go to the daycare center, which she also cleans and we’re a few steps away when BOOM there she is coming out the front door…I am not making that up…Good gravy, we could not have scripted anything better…We said hi and she said hi and we escorted her back to the main building…There wasn’t any chit-chat, tho, perhaps because we are in no way, shape, or form looking for a mate right now…Besides, that was a good start…You do not want to come on to quickly in these situations, especially with a Latina.
After an indoor and office building tour, we were back in the office and Hunter and Darrin come back from something or another, when Hunter invites us all to go an a parking lot tour with him…I didn’t really want to, but it was worthwhile because we ended up with a laff and Hunter ended up doing a nice piece of detective work.
We were turning the corner into the far parking lot – those of you keeping score at home will notice this is where we were talking to Karla – and there were two cars parked near the front door…Hunter noted one belonged to one Nate, a cleaner who Hunter once caught “packing it” in his car one nite…This didn’t please Hunter at all, and he noted he no longer approaches Nate’s car…The laff came from some smart-ass line I made which, unfortunately, we’ve forgotten.
Anyway, we scan the tag at the end of the parking lot and are heading to the door and there are three guys heading to the door, too…One uses his badge to open the door and he starts feeling guilty about something and approaches Hunter, needlessly explaining that he and his mates are going to work something that – being professional security officers, we had deduced…We get inside and the guy, equally needlessly, shows Hunter the badge.
The badge isn’t his, which Hunter noticed because the pic was of an older guy and not a kid…Perhaps thinking they may be part of some roving band of marauding cleaners, Hunter starts asking what the deal is…It turns out that the guy whose pic was on the badge had subcontracted them to do his cleaning for him…I am not making that up…Hunter did some checking with the housekeeping supervisor and she knew all about it, and said it was OK.
We had a 1500 telephone call for our bonus project, so for one of the first times in a long while we were obliged to wake up to an alarm clock (see Sleep Log below)…When we got up we had a text from Hunter wondering of we’d like to avail ourselves of the opportunity to pick up a couple of extra hours at GHSD tonite…Sure, why not…We’re up, so there as no reason not too…The phone call took all of ten minutes, and while you don’t want to walk 6.7 miles on short sleep, we had time to get some walking in, plus some shoulder therapy was scheduled, so we took our go-juice and got dressed.
Shoulder therapy was actually done at home…We’d bought a 2.5-lb dumbbell recently, so we used that and the big news we put a towel under our arm for the two exercises where we keep the elbow in…We are not making that up…We’d seen it on some therapy videos and figured it was probably done for a reason.
At first, we thought it was to force you to keep your elbow in place…After all, if you move your elbow, the towel falls down and you have to pick it up…It does make a slight difference, tho, namely in that with the towel there is no discomfort and without it there is slight to moderate discomfort…After that, we went and walked almost to the fairgrounds before deciding we were pressed for time and turning around.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 0930 Thursday until 1430 Thursday…5.0 hours for the day and 36.5 hours for the week, neither total anything to write home about.
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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.
The Diary of a Nobody was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
Coming soon! Gaylon’s books in actual book form!
