Drowning in Details – At Sea – [01/04/2012]

It won’t be a novelty, we mostly have seen them all before
Prepare for the usual, you should be aware of what’s in store…
We’ve served them on the Baltic, and the Oceanic, The Olympic, The Majestic
and today’s the same there’s nothing changed

[…]

They’re accustomed to the best of all that money buys, the world of free enterprise has given this privilege to the rich

When they’re idle, they’re entitled to their luxury
Which we provide…as forever the source of our pride

Somewhere up above me, I know there is a surface. The sun is shining and there is calm and order. I just can’t quite find that surface just at the moment, but I know it’s there.

I’ve often said that working on a ship is much like being a swan – on the surface it’s all grace and beauty, underneath the swan’s feet are churning up a storm to keep it moving. The analogy is particularly apt right now.

Wrapping up one cruise and starting another is always the most challenging part of any voyage – wrapping up the New Year’s cruise, which has been party central – and preparing for what’s coming next – which is very decidedly the opposite – is proving to be interesting. You can’t ignore the current guests, for one thing they don’t deserve it (their cruise after all isn’t over yet), but you also have a million other things to do before at least 1,000 very demanding customers walk up the decorated gangway in Fort Lauderdale to get their hands shaken by the president of the company and their (massive amounts of) luggage handled by white gloved cabin stewards.

In other words, the Grand World Voyage starts the day after tomorrow, and the ship is – quietly – going insane with preparations. Most of which of course, the guests will never see. Our Cruise Director for the GWV boarded a few days ago (as I believe I previously mentioned) and has been organizing everything from scheduling (three days in advance), to having me run an inventory of all the jigsaw puzzles on board and dispose of any that are missing a single piece (read: everything but the 5000 piece ones that are too big for our tables has to be replaced). Our HM and GRM (Hotel Manager and Guest Relations Manager) boarded three days ago and have remained mostly behind the scenes, in fact I only saw the GRM for the first time today even though I know she’s been on board for a while.

Housekeeping is polishing every bit of brass even more than usual, television screens that may have gone dim over the past week have been miraculously (finally!) fixed, and final cabin assignments are still being arranged even at the 11^th hour. They still don’t know if I have a roommate yet…

And if you were to go out onto the bow, you would catch the scent of fresh paint as they stencil in the great green World Cruise2012 logo on the vast canvas of white. The flagship is once again sporting her proudest colours.

For my part, the Corporate boss of the entire department will be among those boarding on Friday , though just for the day, and it would be just my luck that his pet peeve is the library. In the midst of still trying to finish a seemingly unending inventory (almost…there…), I’ve also got to go around with a ruler and make sure every single book is straight. Not that I wouldn’t do that for this particular voyage anyway, but now I’m worried about it. And of course, since this voyage isn’t over yet, I still have to process several hundred books that are being returned, check them against the inventory, sort them, repair them, catalogue them and reshelve them.

And in between all that, I’ve been working with my shore-side supervisor and the corporate IT officer to fix our library manifest system so that it’s more streamlined and works more easily without causing the librarians to do an hour’s worth of extra work.

It’s been a busy few days…

And it’s not even started yet….