Alarm goes off at seven and you start uptown
You put in your eight hours for the powers that have always been…
There are always days that are like this. Days when the sheer effort required to get out of bed just seems like too much, when your eyes are gritty and you don’t have time to shower and your muscles ache and your mind is too busy from too much stress that isn’t even yours. We share each other’s burdens out here, because a burden shared is a burden lightened.
The crossing is in general proving to be easier on me personally than usual, though the hours are still long and the days are still tiring. That said, it’s only two days in and you can see the cabin fever starting to take old on the fringes of the crew; oddly enough not so much the passengers, not yet at least, but the rest of us are starting to get the symptoms of having stared at the same four walls for too many days in a row (keep in mind many of us had IPM the last port before we put to sea, and before that there were two sea days – so a lot of us have been confined to the ship for 5 days already and we still have five days left).
This is the time of the contract where the job starts to feel like work. Tempers are fraying and sensitivity levels are high, but most of us are pretty good at recognizing when we’re teetering near the edge of unnecessary drama and simply disappearing from the public eye for a while until we feel fit for company again…
Myself included.
Of course it would seem that I have been having something of a run of bad luck with scheduling this cruise; other than the standardized sea day hours, I pulled IPM on the last port before the crossing and subsequently had to run a corporate tour of the ship in the middle of what would otherwise have been my last afternoon ‘off’ before putting to sea, I got drawn for immigration duty (read: 5:30am start) the morning of FLL (I would have had to get up to go through immigration anyway, but there’s a difference between shuffling through the line half-asleep and actually having to WORK for two hours that early in the morning) and as of now I have IPM our first port on the other side – but I am switching that come hell or high water because I need to get OFF this velvet prison for an hour or two before my head explodes!
That said it’s this that makes me glad we only have to do this thing twice a season. No matter how you slice it, it’s just never going to be the most fun voyage of our lives.