Ah yes, another exciting evening of writing my daily updates while on the clock 🙂 This is working out really well. I have already managed to read an entire magazine that I brought with me before I even got around to opening up my laptop. I am finding myself to be very productive at this job.
I arrived home in Geneseo just after 2:00 this morning and was in bed by 2:30. Nothing went seriously wrong last night and so no one needed to wake me up this morning to talk about the project. What a relief. This is the first day that that hasn’t happened. I was really glad because I desperately needed to get some sleep. I can’t believe that I managed to drive all of the way home last night.
I got up just after Andy this morning. We did some project planning and design first thing and then drove up to the city to do some work at the hospital. We got lunch at McDonald’s in Geneseo on the way out of town. Eric wasn’t in the office today because Amanda was with Rachel’s class at school on a field trip to Sonnenburg [sp] gardens in Canandaigua for the day. So Eric was home babysitting. Andy and I tested out some VPN equipment up at the hospital to see if it would work. It didn’t. Bummer. But we grabbed Eric’s old computer while we were there that we are bringing down to get set up for Min to use in her classroom at Castile. There is a very limited number of classroom computers there and her room isn’t wired for ethernet so I am setting up this machine with wireless 802.11g to see if that will work well in the school.
I worked in Hornell tonight. I always forget how close Hornell is to Geneseo. It always seems like it is more than an hour away, maybe even two. But the reality is that it is just over half an hour away! Too bad there isn’t anything interesting there, it might be worth going there from time to time. Actually, there might easily be something interesting there but it is in such a remote location that I never go there for anything. One of the problems with it is that the US Route 86 interchange with i390 happens just to the north of the city so that you never end up driving into the city at all. I don’t think that I have been into Hornell since the time that my Aunt Elizabeth died and I was driving my grandmother and my mom out to Ohio to see her. Mom’s dad, grandpa, was in the same hospital in Canton, OH so we managed to see both of them while we were there. Aunt Elizabeth died that weekend, as we had expected and grandpa was fine, also as expected. That was a long time ago now. Mom was healthy then. At least, mostly so.
On my way home from Hornell, which was pretty early because the store went so smoothly that I was done just after midnight, I stopped off at exit four in Dansville to get some gas across from Noyes Hospital because the gas in Dansville is like ten cents cheaper per gallon than it is in Hornell. While I was pumping gas, a guy who was pumping gas at the pump next to me leaned over and looked around the pump and asked me if I was a local. I said yes and he asked me if I could help direct him to a hotel where he and his buddy could stay because they were from Winchester, VA and driving up to Rochester to pick up a motorcycle that they had just purchased online. They had looked around at the potential places to stay in Dansville and were not too impressed and were hoping that they would find something decent as they travelled towards Rochester. For some reason, I forgot about the very nice Country Inn and Suites in Mt. Morris and instead directed them to the new Quality Inn in Geneseo. I guess that that happened because they had asked me if I knew where a Days Inn was instead of asking for just a generic hotel. I had forgotten momentarily that the Days Inn in Geneseo had been purchased by the Quality Inn just a few weeks ago and was undergoing the reformation at the time. So my mind jumped right to the Geneseo hotel. (This is actually a part of the story, bear with me.) So, I gave them directions to the hotel and sent them on their way.
While travelling north on i390 towards home, it occurred to me that the hotel might be full because the college students going home and having events at the end of the year. So I thought that I would be nice and call ahead to the hotel for these guys and make sure that there was at least one room available there before they went to Geneseo and ended up with no place to stay. I know that not all hotel auditors are willing to help wayward travellers find a room at a competing hotel if they don’t have a room available so I figured that, if there were no rooms, I would head to the hotel and get there before them since I sent the easier but longer way up to exit eight. But I called and there were a few rooms available so it wasn’t a problem. The girl working the desk answered the phone and said “This is Mary.” I hadn’t thought anything of it until I had hung up the phone. After I was off the phone my brain was processing the voice that I had heard and realized that it was, or at least I thought that it was, Mary Johnston who disappeared a year and a half ago. Just after Min and my wedding, Mary had moved to Wellsville and we had lost track of her. Mary has a tendency to do this from time to time. She is really hard to keep tabs on.
So I decided that I would investigate this mysterious Mary at the Quality Inn person to see who it was for myself. So I drove to the hotel on the way home and, sure enough, Mary Johnston has resurfaced in Geneseo. Boy was she surprised to see me. Apparently she has been reading SGL from time to time to make sure that I am still alive but never bothers to actually email or call or anything. She CLAIMS to even have stopped by the house a couple of times after work but has never managed to find anyone at home when she has done so. It is crazy that after a year and a half of wondering where she was, she has been working for the last six months just one block away from the house! And not just working nearby but working the infamous audit shift. I swear that there is something about me that causes the entire universe around me to work the audit. I did it first in 1997 after having had left Tops. I worked the audit at the Days Inn Rochester Thruway off of West Henrietta near LeHigh Station Road. That place was awful but the hours and pay were decent for what you had to do. I had never heard of anyone working a hotel audit before that. Then I convinced Andy that he had to work the opposite hours as me when all of the other auditors left the Days Inn. He was hesitant but he eventually decided to give it a try and ended up working there for a while. Then both Leanne and Megan decided to try it out and ended up working for a while together over at the Comfort Inn Airport on Buell Rd. in Rochester. That was probably 1998 or 1999. Then both Andy and I managed to move over to the Wellesley Inn by MCC. That was after the girls were working at the Comfort Inn, I remember, because Peter Parks had been working at the Comfort with Leanne, Megan and Tristan (who, like Mary, fell off of the face of the earth) and had gotten a position over at the Wellesley and had said that it was awesome. Because he talked to the Comfort, they knew when the audit opened up at the Wellesley and I was able to apply before anyone else even knew that the audit was open. Then Andy came over a few months later. Then, many years later, Miranda started working the audit after she started dating Andy. So, even though she was working in hotels before that, we will count her in the list. And then, Dominica started working at the Conesus Lake Hotel in 2003 and moved to the Fairfield in 2004. And then, in late 2004, Mary started at the Days Inn Geneseo which has now changed to the Quality Inn Geneseo (or the Geneseo Inn as they are calling it at the moment.) So, the Scott gang has quite the history of working the hotel audits in the Greater Rochester area. I would be surprised if more than a handful of people anywhere have such an associated entourage of hotel auditors who all knew each other before they worked unrelated or mostly unrelated hotel audit jobs!
So, I ended up hanging out with Mary until after 2:00 in the morning. We decided that we would do breakfast so I had to get home so that I could get a little bit of sleep before she came over to pick me up early in the morning.