All aboard!!

September 28, 2011

It’s my third day on the ship and what a whirlwind it’s been! Let me start at the beginning.

I signed on to the ship around 4:45 on Monday the 26^th, after receiving a phone call at my hotel from the Crew Administrator on board the ship asking me where I was. I told her that my driver told me I was to be picked up on Tuesday morning and taken to the ship then, but she corrected me and said nope, can you take a cab to get here tonight? And I said of course! So here we are.

I met Erika, the Crew Administrator, who works in the HR department.  She took me to the medical center where I handed them my GIANT folder of paperwork and the woman looked at me and said “What did they DO to you??” and I briefly explained what had happened and they just looked at the pile of paperwork bewildered and said “Well…ok!” I thought that was mildly entertaining.

Then Erika called Kerwin, who turned out to be my immediate supervisor aka Head Stage Staff. He’s a very nice guy, and he took me to my cabin and showed me the ropes. My cabinmate’s name is Lauren, she’s one of the dancers in the shows we do. She’s from Nebraska and is really nice so far—I  feel awful for her because the day before I got here she hurt her foot/ankle in a lift (dance move) and hasn’t been able to do a whole lot. She’s had to put ice on it and couldn’t go ashore in Hawaii, poor thing!

Anyways, I have been training and working and working and training! Here’s how my immediate department (as we can call it) is set up as far as chain of command goes (as I know it right now and as it pertains to me)

Top: Cruise Director (Bobby from Scotland—he’s pretty much in charge of anything and everything related to the guests and entertaining them.

Next: Production and Stage Manager (Jason from Oregon)—He’s my boss. He’s awesome!!! He’s from Oregon and has taken to calling me “Ohio”

Next: Head Stage Staff (Kerwin from The Phillipines)—my immediate supervisor. Makes my schedule, and also lives around the hall from me.

Next: Stage Staff (Me, Rafael (USA) and Adrian (Romania))—we are the stage staff! And yes I am the token female..

There’s also our Sound Tech, his name is Greg and he’s from Hungary, and then our Light Tech’s name is Nick and he’s American, too.

Mind you, these are the people I will work with on a regular and daily basis. This doesn’t include the all of the dancers (who are all American, go figure!), the band and orchestras, and other miscellaneous people I work with from time to time. There are over 900 crew members on this ship, and I don’t even understand all of the ranks and chains of commands yet, but, I’m sure I’ll get there eventually.

Also—OH MY GOSH is this place confusing!!! I have gotten lost I don’t even know how many times. There are so many stairs and halls and secret doors that go from guest areas to crew areas and they lead to all these different places and I have to know how to get everywhere. Oh my goodness, it’s exhausting trying to figure it all out.  Here are some important things for you,  my beloved readers, to understand because I will probably refer to these places or use these terms more often than not:

Decks:  the floors of the ship. They go from 0 (all the way at the bottom) to 13 (all the way at the top...not including the Bridge)

The Bridge: where all of the important people who make the ship run, like the Captain, do their thing

“The I-95”---is a long hallway on Deck 2 that runs all the way Aft to all the way Forward. It’s the best and easiest way to get from one end to the other.

Aft---the back of the ship

Forward---the front of the ship

The Mess---the cafeteria for staff and crew members.  I’m considered a Staff member which is a higher “rank” from crew members, but, we’re all considered crew members regardless. It’s kind of confusing but, it is what it is.

Cabin---where I sleep and live and shower and all of those things. For those of you who were at Allegheny with me, my cabin is basically the size of my Caflisch single with a bathroom attached. A bathroom that is very tiny, and you can pretty much use the shower, sink and toilet all the the same time! Very time saving! Mine is on Deck 2

Aurora and/or Aurora Theatre---the main theatre where I work

The Centrum---the big center of the ship where the guests love to hang out. We set performances there every now and then

The Rock Wall---sometimes we have to help at the rock wall because there isn’t a sports staff on this ship. So we help harness in the people that want to climb and then do the cabling and such, too

I’m sure I will come up with more as I go, so, I’ll keep you posted.

 As of now I haven’t learned too much about how many of the basic things work like mail, but I do know that you only have to send things as far as Miami and then RCCL takes care of things from there. That’s good news because sending things to Australia would be crazy expensive!

In general though everyone is really friendly and I’ve also learned that, according to my boss Jason, the ratio of men to women working on this ship is like 10:1, so, the odds are in my favor there! I’m not surprised at this though, just looking around I can tell that’s true.

We are at the end of day 1 at sea on our way to Papetee, Tahiti, French Polynesia, and the waves are a little rough right now and they say it’s only going to get worse. I don’t know how it is up in the guest areas but down here on Deck 2 in my cabin I can definitely feel us rocking back and forth. It’s worse up on the theatre, so, I imagine as you go up the worse it gets, even though Deck 2 is still above water technically. Right now Jason estimates that the waves are around 2-4 foot swells and they say that as we get closer to the islands it will get worse and somewhere between the islands and New Zealand….or maybe it was New Zealand and Australia….either way somewhere in that area the waves may get up to 20-30 feet!!!! I am a little nervous for that, but, I guess we’ll see how it goes!

This post is already ridiculously long so I’ll leave you all to it.

Much love from somewhere in the Pacific!

B

September 29, 20111

So this morning I had another round of safety training and we learned about Crowd Management and how to deal with guests in an emergency situation. Our trainer is the Chief Safety Officer, whose name is Chris Bean (England), showed us some videos and then took us to a random guest area and told us that he was a panicking guest and that we were responsible for taking him to a safe place on Deck 5 (where the lifeboats are). He was testing our crowd mentality to see who would be a leader, a sheep (just following whatever anyone else said) and a panicker. Well, he had had us point out where the nearest escape routes were and then he said okay, now, GO. So we headed out and we needed to turn left in this door and the people ahead of me kept walking and I was like wait….we need to turn here! And then Chris was standing behind me and I said “Don’t we need to go this way?” and he smile and called everyone back to us and then we proceeded my way and then I led the way out and he laughed and chastised the group saying “Brittany, the NEW HIRE, got us out here faster than those of you who have been on ships before. Tsk tsk!” It was awesome!!

Then we had a tech run of one of our production shows called “Piano Man”, which isn’t a show per se but it’s 90 minutes of musical numbers and props and stuff….so it’s a show but it doesn’t have much of a plot or anything. It’s good though! I only messed up a couple of things which was good, considering it was my first time. We’ve got two real shows tonight and those should be pretty well attended because it’s raining right now.

Tomorrow we will cross the equator and apparently there’s some ceremony/performance type thing, which will be fun!

Much love from somewhere even further in the Pacific!

B