Welcome to p
art nine of my series, How to Survive at Sea: A Stage Crew’s Guide. Click here to see last week’s post, or click here to jump to the first in the series.
The Rest is Like Prison
Cruise ships run on a sort of weird pseudo-military/sleep-away camp mentality. The hierarchy is strict, the uniforms are ugly, and the schedule is punishing. You’re told when to wake up, when to go to sleep, when to eat your meals and when to take your leisure hours. You also share a teeny tiny space with a person randomly selected for you, and I imagine living in a cabin is a lot like living in a prison cell.
From roommates who talked in their sleep to roommates who fall out of bed screaming that the ceiling is collapsing (coughthatwasmecough), I heard a lot of horror stories about the people you were sometimes forced to bunk with. Being a good roommate on the sea is pretty much the same as on land – open communication and a positive attitude. But being roommates on the open seas has downsides that roomies on land don’t generally bring. For instance, you don’t have any say in who you bunk with. Maybe you love your coworker Maya, but they make you stay with Sarah, who makes you want to claw your eyes out. You can change rooms as long as all four roommates are fine with the switch (and couples did this a lot, since sharing space with someone of the opposite sex was forbidden).
We had some rules in our cabin to try and help make the teeny tiny living quarters a little more liveable. Of course there was the first-in rule: whoever got there first got the bottom bunk. Even if the other person fell out of bed and hurt their side and was on drugs and had a hard time clambering up the ladder to bed. Rules are important, okay guys? We also had a no-men in the cabin rule, which was actually good. Bringing guys home is a challenge that I should have addressed in the section about hooking up on cruise ships, but suffice it to say that there was a giant pink shoe in the props lock-up that got a lot of after-hours attention from the dancers…
Rules that might have helped us would have involved turning the TV off when both people have gone to sleep, because despite what you seem to think it does not make a good “white noise” machine. Or no playing music when your other roommate is already playing music even though it works because you annoy her enough that she turns hers off. (Yeah, I had some great roommates…)
Another part of working a cruise ship that everyone hated was emergency duty. Every time we were in port, one person from each department had to stay on the ship in case of an emergency. Our department combined that with the crappy duties no one wanted to do, including getting up at 6am and changing the lights from “night mode” to “day mode” all around the ship. Luckily, you were allowed to sell your emergency duties to other crew members. The cost of that would depend on how good the port was. When you were in Alaska someone would take it off your hands for $20. But trying to get out of duty in Honolulu? Good luck finding a buyer for less than $60.
But there are perks at sea, too – or at least my coworkers managed to find their way out of some challenging situations. For instance, you can:
1) Sleep with the cruise director. Any senior officer will do, but the cruise director was the head of my particular totem pole. Perks of this tactic include access to the officer’s laundry, sleeping in a cabin on deck 11 (hello windows! hello bathtub! hello room service!), and easier access to restaurants and dining areas (come right in, Mr.Smith! We have a table near the window for you!)
2) Befriend the bar staff. A common sentiment on cruise ships seems to be “if we’re drunk enough, we won’t notice anything else!” Those bartenders will make that single a double, or keep the metal curtain up a few minutes after closing time for their special friends.
3) Bribe the Shore Excursion Staff. One of the greatest parts of the job, in theory, was going on cheap tours as a passenger chaperone. However, the system for choosing who gets picked as a chaperone was vague, and seemed to involve how well the staff knew you and liked you. So buying them chocolates, knowing their names, and asking about their children helped you go snorkelling in Hawaii, chopping trees in Alaska, and whale watching in California.
4) Get in with the mafia. The “Filipino Mafia” where a real thing. While these people don’t chop off toes or launder money, if you want something, they can get it. They’re insular and organised, but they can be nice to outsiders who are nice to them. They provide illegal chickens and cakes for cabin parties, know where to get all the best equipment backstage, and always keep an eye on you around and about the ship. It’s likely that some of your coworkers are part of the mafia, so try to be polite to everyone, just in case.
5) Be a terrible roommate. Solo cabins are very hard to come by – officers each get their own cabin, but even our senior supervisor and lighting technicians have to share. However, the ship tries very hard to only bunk people of the same department together, since we all have such divergent schedules. So sometimes, it just shakes down that someone in a particular department will wind up with a solo cabin, and everyone wants it to be them. One strategy for getting a solo cabin is being such a bad roommate that no one will agree to live with you, and in despair the company gives you your own place. One drummer I knew would complain if you smoked, complain if you chewed gum to cover the smell of the smoke, complain if you snored, complain if you listened to music, complain, complain, complain. He’s still waiting for his solo cabin, but the chances seem better every day.
Join us next week for the FINAL installment of How to Survive at Sea, where we’ll be talking about the dangers at sea and the many places I got to visit.