Today’s Diary entry is with Sparrow’s compliments. Enjoy.
It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Friday, March 20
The Night At The Hotel
More misfits in the lobby tonite…This time they were members of a band, plus a couple of stragglers, playing cards, and there were about ten people at the back table…We have some zero clue what they were playing, tho…We’re not Mr Vegas – tho, perhaps, one time we were – but offhand we couldn’t think of a card game for ten people that didn’t involve the removal of clothes, but game rules are hardly our lookout here…We’re a nite auditor, not a pit boss…BEsides, they’re musicians who spend a lot of time on the road, and if they have a ten-player card game, more power to them.
They were pretty resourceful, too…They had a case of what had to be the cheapest beer sold at the retailer, and it’s a party foul – or so we’ve heard – to offer warm beer at a card game, so they put the case – and this was brilliant – in the sundry stand cooler!!!…I am not making that up…I’m sure the home office – or perhaps even the town’s municipal code – has a regulation against that somewhere, but even if we knew about it, we could hardly be expected to enforce it…The game didn’t break up until 0100 or so.
Both Carissa, the restaurant manager, and Robert reported the anticipated corporate bigwigs had shown up, and Carissa even knew the rooms they were staying in…Evidently one of the bigwigs is new to the company and is on a familiarization tour of the company’s hotels, and the other two are showing her the ropes…Carissa rattled off each bigwig’s name and title, but we immediately forgot what they were…It didn’t matter…We’re the nite auditor and, of course, we weren’t bothered…One, because they were probably sleeping, and two, because no one messes with a nite auditor who’s been around for years and shows up on time every nite, never leaving the hotel in a lurch.
We saw Dray the Dairy Delivery Driver (D4) for the first time in a while…Soon after he headed out to his truck, he returned and said he was going to have a problem getting out…He was parked in one of the two semi/bus parking spots in the northwest corner of the parking lot that run north/south, with D4 parked on the inside slot closest to the highway…Ahead, to the right of these spots and perpendicular to them, are three parking spots designed for cars, tho there were two medium-sized trucks parked in them: closest to D4’s semi was a smaller dairy truck, and two spots over was a Penske rental truck.
The Penske rental was sticking out far enuff so that D4 thought he wouldn’t be able to get out without hitting either the truck or the porte-cochere, tho at first – and in what is not the Upset of the Year – we didn’t understand his problem…We thought the smaller dairy truck was his, in which case, if he couldn’t turn right, he could veer left and turn around in the overflow parking area behind the restaurant and adjacent to Hotel B…Then we realized the big semi was his and, yes, we could see where there might be a problem, tho eyeballing it we thought he could make it with room to spare on both sides.
So we had to play detective…We went to the bucket and checked the registration cards and found a Penske truck registered to 113…Still a Joe Friday fan, we took the registration card out to make sure the license plate matched, tho had we been in full Joe Friday mode we would’ve noted the license plate before heading back in…Anyway, they matched, which was bad because you don’t really want to wake someone up here…On the other hand, D4 is entitled to get out…So we dawdled a bit to watch D4 give it a go, and he managed to make it out of the parking lot without hitting either the offending truck or the hotel.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
0930 Tuesday until 1630 Tuesday…7.0 hours for the day and 19.5 hours for the week.
We don’t know what the hell’s going on…We had some coffee at work, our only coffee of the week, and get to sleep when we want, at 0930…When we don’t have coffee, we don’t get sleep until an hour or two later.
The Tuesday evening gym session will be covered tomorrow…God bless all of you.
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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.
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