There is one definite downside to working seven day cruises out of Seattle as opposed to the longer cruises I’ve become used to. Something I’d forgotten as I haven’t done anything less than a two week cruise for a long time now. What it comes down to is this: Seattle is where the head office of the company is situated, and 7 day cruises are very, very popular with large groups who want to do retreats. Those two things added together mean that it’s usually really convenient for the Seattle office to book whatever charter is looking for a ship onto the next available 7-day Alaska.
The crew has been known to call the Alaska run “charter hell” for good reason.
In a strange oxymoronic twist of fate – it’s a lot easier on us if the ship gets chartered out in full. For a full charter, we don’t have to do anything but what the people who have essentially “bought” us for a week tell us to do. If they want to shut down the bars, purge the library, blockade the casino – they can go for it, they’re footing the bill. There’s even a nudist cruise that charters out a ship once in a while – something which I hope never happens on one of my contracts (scary!). Full charters are a lot of work for some departments and almost a vacation for others.
Partial charters however, are a whole different kettle of salmon. You put a group of 900 people with special requirements on a ship that holds 1,800 and you not only have to cater to their every single whim (because trust me, you do not want a group of that force to be unhappy with you), but you also have to deal with the 900 regular guests who are usually very put out that the best areas of the ship are constantly booked for private functions. Up to and including my office. As I’ve mentioned before, the library on this class of ship is integrated into the observation deck bar, when the time comes for a private function they drop a wall across that divides the library from the bar.
The problem? My desk – and my entire fiction/history/biography/magazine section, is on the wrong side of the wall. When the wall goes up, it cuts me off from the rest of the library and basically renders me unable to work.
This means I get a lot of unexpected time off when there are partial charters on board.
I’ve been known to fill this time by running coffee orders to and from the show lounge for the tech team – since my desk is right across from the coffee shop and the techies pretty much sleep in the show lounge during charters.
Since I boarded this ship a week ago we’ve already had one charter, and for the next three weeks we have three. The first of which is 900 strong, and will take over the show lounge, the meeting rooms, the observation bar and the nightclub at all hours of the night and day.
It’s going to be an interesting month…