It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Monday, May 3
At 0215 the phone rings…I’m in the back office sitting right next to it, so I can’t very well stare at it crossly with my hands on my hips, but I do manage to issue a modest scowl before answering because who in the hell calls a hotel front desk at 0215???….Well, regular readers of this crap know it could be anyone for reasons ranging from a wake-up call request to someone needing a doctor recommendation and every few years it’s someone needing an ambulance…So you answer as promptly as you can, and with a good attitude, too.
As it was, it’s some ditzy sounding broad who wants to add a room to her reservation beginning June 6…She’d up here with a hockey team…She starts in with her confirmation number, which I am not prepared to receive because I am still logging in because I don’t stand by all night waiting to do this and when I am ready to enter figures – because she’s already annoyed me multiple times – I ask for her arrival date, just to be contrary, which I already knew of course.
She starts in and immediately and advises what the deal is: she’ll be in town – evidently for the world championships, judging by her tone – and it turns out they have some more people joining them…I get everything but a breakdown on their season and good gravy, she won’t shut up and then my head starts spinning and starts wondering why in theeeee hell is she calling me at 0215???…Does this have to be done right now???…Evidently it did, because there ol’ Sparrow was dealing with it and instead of making a new reservation I merely added a room to the current reservation because the payment method is going to be the same.
There was some modest hilarity regarding the restaurant this morning…At 0600 a cook shows up wanting to be let in and this is curious because we were told the restaurant would be closed Sunday, Monday and Tuesday mornings this week, allegedly for maintenance but we all suspect they don’t have the manpower right now…The kid is Hispanic and he has about as much English as I do Spanish, but I manage to convey that ol’ Sparrow was under the impression the restaurant wasn’t opening until 1600 today and also managed to convey a request as to who his boss is – Quien es su jefe???.
He laffs and says he didn’t know which isn’t entirely unbelievable because things have been a mess there since the death in the family and he gets out his phone and in a few minutes produces a text that translated made even less sense than the Spanish original…Then we go consult the schedule, which he can’t figure out but yours truly can and no one is scheduled for today until the dinner prep crew starts rolling in this afternoon…Still tho, the kid manages to make himself, putting the deliveries that came earlier in the morning away.
Some moderate action at the veterans service office (VSO) today…I called the gent who needs his house modified for his disability and told him, yes, the VA does offer adaptive housing grants and made an appointment for him to come in Wednesday to fill the form out…It’s a one-page form and pretty easy even by VA standards, tho the “Remarks” section had better be filled in pretty thoroughly…I otherwise have no idea how this works…Brian from the regional office said in his voicemail that you fill out the form and send it in the VA takes care of the rest after it’s approved and we weren’t otherwise able to talk today.
Then there was a message from Rusty…The tone of his message made it sound like we were BFFs but if we had met the particulars were escaping me…I called him back and it turned out he used to live in the county and a couple of years ago he had called my predecessor Natalie about someone looking for some horses and now he had one for sale and he and Natalie were such good pals he didn’t even know she’d left the post over two years ago…I was obliged to lose ten minutes of my life listening to him yap about horses and why he moved and why he might move back and get the sheriff recalled…Since he had no need of my services nor I any interest in him I wanted to hang up, but I was typically gracious.
There was an article in the paper recently about our small town’s council reconsidering its ordinance that allows weed shops – like the one being built right next door to The Shire – to open…It made me laff because the article quoted some town leaders as preferring they be out of the way and generally out of site and not near anything except vacant lots and here they are letting one go up right on Main Street as you enter town.
I don’t really care…One, this town’s going to need a tax base once the plant closes later this decade and, two, the new fence is already up and it already the place looks nicer than the dilapidated house and garage that used to be there, but I actually laffed when I read the lines about not wanting them in view.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 1730 Monday until 2130 Monday…4.0 hours for the day and 11.5 hours for the week.
I have some zero clue why it took me so long to fall asleep.
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.
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