For position and positioning are socially conditioning
So you work your life away, where you work is where you stay
You know, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be a guest. To not have to worry about anything except what dining room you want to eat at that night. To be able to send your food back to the kitchen because it wasn’t done to your taste and never once have to think twice about doing so. To never wonder if you were going ashore in port, because there’s no such thing as ‘shore leave’ to concern yourself with. To pick up the phone and simply know that someone is going to be there to answer your every whim. To know that you’re going to be in the same cabin from beginning to end, unless you choose to move. People don’t realize how hard we work for them, how much we do, how easy we make it seem. They don’t want to know, so they don’t.
I could do it of course, there’s absolutely nothing stopping me from taking a cruise. In fact, working for the line makes it even easier as we’re entitled to a lot of opportunities that make cruising much more affordable. But at most I’d be able to go on a two week cruise, something simple and basic. I could never afford a flagship cruise, not even at a cut rate. That’s simply not a world I’m meant to be a part of right now.
People high, people low, keep the state a status quo
I’ve talked about feeling like I’m made of clockwork. Sometimes it’s hard to admit that to the majority of the company you are a number. I’m very fortunate, my ship-side supervisor and I are good friends, we always have been, from the days before she was my supervisor. But that friendship rests quite outside our working relationship. The moment I even think about starting to abuse that friendship, I won’t have it anymore. The reason I get the occasional perk is because I don’t ask for it, the reason I get nice things is because I don’t act like a diva. The thing is, there’s a fine line between not acting like a diva and being a doormat, and sometimes that’s a line I don’t always know which side I rest on.
But the clockwork days do pass. You remember that you do want to be here, and that everyone is having just as hard a time of it as you, that everyone is just as lonely as you are. Just as frustrated and at times just as angry. We’re all just as prone to lash out; we’re all just as prone to snap. The fact that circumstances force us to bottle it up and ignore it makes it more difficult, but at least we’re all in the same circumstance together.
I have a fantastic job. I have a life that many people envy. And yes, my gears get stuck once in a while.
Fortunately, every one of us clockwork people has some kind of oil can with us…