Editor’s Note: Today’s Diary entry is with Sparrow’s compliments.
It’s Sparrow…An average man passing an average life.
Tuesday, September 29
Get Out Your History Books
It’s been a Jekyll and Hyde sort of week at the hotel: a sold-out weekend followed by two slow nites where occupancy was barely over 50%…Nobody bothered us too much tho, and combined with two easy nites at the hospital, this has been about as easy a week of labor as someone who spends 60 hours on the clock can have.
We did see something Saturday morning we’d never seen before…Regular readers of this crap know this happens from time to time, tho it was moderately surprising considering we’ve been knocking around hotel front desks for going on 40 years – since right after we got out of the Navy – and you’d think there would come a time when there would be nothing new to see.
Wrong-o…What happened was this guy came to the front desk to tattle on his roommate, who was violating hotel policy – and annoying his roommate – by smoking in the bathroom…(They’re part of a large group of Latinos, we think from some consulate in the big city, but we’re not sure, so roommates could well be assigned at random.)…We follow him to the room, and his roomie is lying on the bed reading…It was plain someone had been smoking, and you do not have to be Joe Friday (look that up, kiddos) to conclude it was him.
No one spoke great English, but our trusty Spanglish imparted the message that smoking wasn’t allowed on property…We presumed our message was received and returned to the front desk.
That wasn’t the end of it, tho, because a couple of hours later the same guy came back again to snitch on his roommate…So we go back, and this time the group leaders are summoned, because yours truly had started making noises about someone paying a $250 smoking fee, which will get your attention in any language.
So now it’s like we’re in a scene from a Mexican novella: folks looking at each other significantly and talking in hushed tones…Eventually, a guy says he will come by and pay the $250 fee, and I guess they’ll beat it out of the offender later.
This was unprecedented; we’d never had anybody snitch on a roomie before, and we considered a variety of options while each time walking to the room…A verbal warning was clearly called for the first time, but the second???…This guy simply was not getting the message, and we thought about kicking him out…But then it became clear they were part of the group, and they’re annual guests, and they want our goodwill, so the smoking charge seemed to take care of the problem.
Lights…Camera…Action
The big news is we do have a new binge-watch show…I am not making that up…Last week ten seasons of The Blacklist ended…Like some shows, it probably stuck around a season too long, but the acting was really good, and while it’s not an all-timer, we enjoyed it.
Our search for a follow-up took a while, tho…Nothing immediately asserted itself, and eventually we settled on Seinfeld, but that wasn’t really resonating with us, a mild upset because we’ve always enjoyed the episodes and clips of it we’ve seen…Eventually, tho, we settled on The Crown, a show about Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain…Like the papacy, the British royal family has long fascinated us, even tho we’re neither Catholic nor British subjects, tho half our blood is English.
Bon Appétit
Recall two weeks ago we ordered a pizza from Dominos, one of their new ones that look like a domino, an idea so brilliant we found ourselves wondering why it took so long…We were happy with it and tried to order one last week, but kept getting an error message.
The same thing happened tonite, then it occurred to us to come kicking and screaming into the second half of the third decade of the 21st century and order on the app…Bingo…For whatever reason, Dominos didn’t want to work the past two weeks on the back office desktop, tho it did once…We got our usual white sauce pizza loaded with assorted pork products, and because we needed another item to meet the minimum delivery order, we got some chicken nuggets, too.
The Weekly Visit
Dray the Dairy Delivery Driver (D4) was by a bit later than usual, 0330 or so, late enuff so that we wondered if he’d actually made it up…The room under his name was occupied – and in his preferred room – but maybe someone else had come up at the last minute.
No siree, he was merely having technical problems with his company-issued handheld device…Neither one of us had any earth-shattering news to report, but D4 and ol’ Sparrow have been chatting most Tuesday mornings for the past eight years, and we really don’t need anything earth-shattering.
Sparrow For Congress…Vote Early…Vote Often
It was productive on the bonus project work front this week…After a few days off, we’ve resumed posting campaign videos at assorted places…It’s more or less the same stuff, but in a slightly different format, and we consulted some AI apps to nail down the best hashtags to use and when to use them…Daily Report is back but, mercifully, we’re not hosting it…We’re leaving that to a couple of AI characters we came up with last year, tho we will make regular appearances in other formats because people need to see the candidate…We also did a lot of side-hustle videos for crap we’re doing under a pen name that you will never see.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log:
1030 Tuesday until 1800 Tuesday…7.5 hours for the day, and the weekly figure will return.
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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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