Blast from the past

 

Dear reader, it is February already!

Everything around me is still closed, we are still in a (extended) lockdown + now we have  curfew that inspired violent riots, burning, looting and hooligans fighting against the police so my goal was just to keep my chin up, head above the water and mind my own business. For some reason I am still stagnating with the reading but that just means that instead of literature, I am reading chapters on Wikipedia and such. I am also enjoying long walks and discovering different neighbourhoods that I have never seen before, but this actually might be another essay.

Out of the blue, on my Facebook page, I got a reminder about something that I posted 10 years ago. It was a photo taken at my than current cruise ship, while we were in South Africa. What you see on this picture is a typical delivery of new boxes back than - our deliveries were so huge, so monumental, so enormous and consistent week after week, that it took a team of twenty people just to get all of this unpacked from the pallets and bring on the ship, with elevators to the floor where we had to open and distribute new products. Before we opened this, it had to be inventoried and checked - and since this was time consuming (but it had to be done in a certain time frame), I was the one responsible for this while my colleagues worked in their places. So I would go, week after week, trough all of these boxes, check do delivery lists match the quantity of the products delivered, note down all the discrepancies and than slowly work my way trough the mountain of these boxes, day after day. Usually this mess would be cleaned and empty just in time for the new delivery. And than I will start everything all over again. It was extremely hard work and I kind of don't even want to think about those days.

The reason why I am writing this is because apparently lots of my ex-colleagues are looking back with nostalgia and yearning. Many of them are claiming they miss the good old days and even ask me do I feel the same. Lots of them are at home, unhappy and frustrated with the fact that the world epidemics forced them to stop with the work on cruise ships. And I find it so mind-boggling: our work was so incredibly hard in every possible way (psychically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, etc) that regular people who have no knowledge how the cruise industry works behind the scenes would never ever accept or work in these conditions. In fact, 90% of the people imagine that our life was sun and fun and Pina Colada since "we lived on a ship" but in reality we were living in a windowless, shared cabins and worked seven days a week. Just look at this photo and tell me who in their right mind would miss this kind of life? And it constantly confuses and even angers me when my ex colleagues claim they miss the ship life. 

What exactly do they miss? Let's look a little closer. Sharing a super tiny space with a complete stranger? Eating greasy food in a canteen? Or even slightly better version in a guest area, where you are treated as intruder? Do they miss working 12 hours per day? Or dealing with 2 000 guests who clearly don't care to buy anything now but will come on the last day and demand the same product that you were offering for one day only and can't possibly pull out of the hat now? Deck sales, crew sales, midnight sales and all these things that take even more working hours than usual? Or do they miss constant drills, trainings and hundred other obligatory things that are happening in one's "free time"? I mean, seriously, the only thing worth it is the chance (if you can) to go outside and see the world - and even this was not something guaranteed because the workload might keep you on the ships for weeks. Sure, there is always a camaraderie and it has to be wherever people live and work together, but this is far from a high school party - its the result of necessity and I remember most of the time just being annoyed with a constant company and making a lot of effort to find my own corner. 

I understand that many of my ex colleagues look back trough the rose glasses and remember things like fun. "Oh, what a great times we had together on that ship!" And than I remind them how we slaved for weeks without ever having a chance to go outside, how we worked until 4 a.m. and slept just a few hours between shifts, how badly we were treated by a ship's medical team (no matter whats wrong, you'll get a Paracetamol), how the only chance to have clean clothes was to use crew laundry room at the crack of a dawn (because there was nobody around than), how totally and utterly exhausted we were all of the times and there must have been a reason why our contracts lasted maximum 6 months and not more - because they found out that after that period people can not work and function properly. I am also aware that those who "miss the ships" actually worked on a cruise ships just a short period of time so they remember it as a nice, adventurous episode. Obviously, there had to be a reason why they left in a first place. I stayed and stayed and stayed and worked for fifteen years, long after the initial first excitement had evaporated. I had longed and dreamed about different life on land where as a regular civilian I would work just 9 to 5 and not be available on call all the time, obliged to run for a midnight drills, drug tests, trainings and all sorts of clockwork schedules. And now when I finally live on land and people still ask me do I miss the ships, I think they must be joking. Absolutely not. I worked so hard and my life was so exhausting that I have absolutely no desire to ever step on a cruise ship again (in fact, I have kind of distaste for the sea). Just remembering what kind of experiences we had to go trough, fills me with anger. Most of the time I don't dwell on this but the photo above was a reminder on my life ten years ago. When I see this, I feel like I have died and arrived in Heaven.