Every time a big change over happens in the entertainment department (such as this week when the cruise director left on vacation and the new fellow wanted to introduce himself to us all) there’s a big department meeting. We all pile into the vast expanse of the show lounge (and when there’s only maybe 40 of you in there it really does feel like an absurdly big space) and listen to the pre-cruise briefing and then most of the core team peels off to go to their various duties while the cast prepares for the opening night bumper show.
As far as the librarians go (and yes at the moment – and for the foreseeable future of this contract according to the current crew list, there are two of us which is AMAZING on so many levels), we just go straight back to work. The librarians and the youth staff aren’t introduced in the opening night bumper with the rest of the team, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone other than the person in Head Office who said “this is how it shall be”. So we were rather surprised when we bumped into the new cruise director on the way out of the theatre and he asked if both of us were going to be on stage that night.
Um…librarians aren’t allowed to be in the show sir. One of those weird decisions.
Oh yeah, forgot about that. Nonsense. You’re part of the team, so you should be on stage. Get the dance captain to show you where to stand.
So…it’s been about a year and a half since I was in the opening night bumper, and it was different then (man I do not miss those game shows!) so my ‘shadow’ (the girl I’m training) and I plunked ourselves down in the audience to watch rehersal to figure out precisely what was going on (the rest of the team has done this dozens of times so they don’t need to watch the whole show).
The show took us till 10:30, something I remember from when I used to be part of it all the time, so we were late closing the library, which made it doubly annoying when one of the gates jammed SO badly that it actually dislodged the sign above the section and sent it plummeting with distressing speed towards my head (ROLL!), but all in all this cruise is off to a good start- I still continue to really like this ship, and hey, at the moment I have a partner! And having two librarians on board rocks, speeds up the inventory, lightens shifts, and means (almost most importantly) mornings off for both of us.
So…we shall see….