When you’re racing with the clock
(Hurry up)
When you’re racing with the clock
(Hurry up)
And the second hand doesn’t understand that your back may break and your fingers ache
And your constitution isn’t made of rock!
It’s a losing race when you’re racing with the, racing, racing, racing with the clock!
First day back from a crossing is its own special brand of insanity. Because we’ve been in Europe for nearly a year, coming back to the states is not actually a simple matter. There are at least three major inspections to be done – all of which are equally important, all of which came onboard at the same time (and these are people that want to be dealt with now, not five minutes from now, not even five seconds from now, right now). When we were in line for the full crew immigration inspection there was a sudden call from the back of the line which – though it wasn’t in English – went something along the lines of
Kitchen and Galley staff! Book it! USPH is here!
And wham, every chef, barista and kitchen attendant in the line went running. You don’t mess with the public health inspection. Of course, you also don’t mess with immigration, which they all had to report back to at some point later when USPH had completed the necessary tasks. Inevitably the delay in clearing crew (which couldn’t in any way be avoided) led to a slight delay in debarking the passengers and there goes the domino effect.
You also don’t mess with USCG – US Coast Guard – who board the ship for a scheduled general fire/abandon ship drill every time a cruise ship re-enters US waters after a specific time away. We knew this was coming, we’d been drilled and trained for it and the crew genuinely does know it’s stuff, but Coast Guard drill is long; they obviously have to look at everything and question a bunch of people and inspect all the machinery and such. All of which is good and necessary, it just takes a long time.
In the midst of all this we’re also trying to embark new crew (HUGE crew turn around in FLL) and figure out where they all need to go for their various trainings, assigned buddies are knocking on doors trying to find their charges (because the normal pick up point was directly in the path of the fire drill so THAT didn’t work), and all of the rest of us are trying to find time to do our actual required set ups for our regular work shift. I don’t start work until mid-morning on turn around day (providing there aren’t a lot of cross-voyage guests on board) – but before that there’s a lot of prep-work that goes into getting the library ready for the next batch of guests.
We were also trying to get the previous guests off the ship. Sometimes they don’t want to leave, and the ship must hit ‘zero count’ before we can start boarding the new guests. Eventually we get down to the final ‘final’ call where the last stragglers get paged by name, and if that doesn’t work I suspect they may go to the cabins.
But everyone must have left eventually because at noon the new guests started flooding in. That said I hadn’t checked out more than one book by 2:30 in the afternoon, a well welcome change from the crossing where over 500 books went out in the first two hours!
But either way, we made it over, safe warm and dry…and our reward now? Fun, sun and margaritas!