When Your Worth Is Measured By…. – San Diego – [10/27/2019]

Every day’s a struggle when you’re living down below
When your worth is measured by whether or not you’ve got a window!
~ Cruise Ship Life Rap (courtesy of the Dawn Princess)

Before anyone can really understand the strange significance of what I’m about to report – you have to understand just how rare it is to have natural light below the passenger decks. Natural light onboard to a crew member? Golden, and rare as a unicorn (or chocolate chip mint ice cream at the ice cream station…scratch that, you have a far better chance at the ice cream station).

Keeping that in mind…

I was sitting with my supervisor at dinner last night (my supervisor is brilliant), and she happened to ask me what kind of cabin I was in this contract. Now, my position lost our “good” cabin on this class of ship about half a year ago or so when they rolled in a bunch of new entertainment programs. We bumped down from a fair-sized double-bed cabin to the same size of bunk bed cabin I used to have in my librarian days. Still private thankfully, but certainly not what we had been lucky enough to have before.

So the conversation went something like this:

Me: Oh, I’m in a bunk cabin. We lost our good cabin on the big ships when they did the cabin shuffle to bring in the new bands.

PM: y’know I think I have a double-bed cabin spare until December because we don’t get the new group until then. Come by the office later and I’ll get you set up.

At this point I just think “sweet! Better room! Bigger bed! Yay!” and somewhere in the very back of my mind there was a vague tickling of “maybe…yeah, dream on…that’ll never happen…”

I pop down to the crew office and collect my new key and check out the new digs, with the plan of moving the next day as it was already late. And then I open up the door to the new room and there, glowing with light real moonlight….is a porthole.

I have a porthole room.

I have a window!!!!

This is a temporary thing, and will likely not be something that will happen ever again after the end of this contract. Even as it stands I might only have the room until the end of November, after that it depends on whether or not the new group coming on has more than five members (if they don’t, I can stay).

But real, true, natural light…I can see the outside world…

This is definitely one of those things that you likely will never understand unless you have lived below decks…that quote about “your worth is measured by if you have a window”? that’s not a joke…this is a “little” thing that isn’t at all that little..

Excuse me, I have to go and stare at the ocean now…

You know…from my window!