Safety Testing

Safety exam.....October 14th....high noon. Written in blood or maybe black ink on the tattered piece of paper rolled up in my door handle. I miss door knobs. All we have are those sideways handles that protrude out and to the left. Every door is like that. Pushing on them is weird. Unnatural. The same could never be said about door knobs. They're a joy to push or pull. AND they're (most often) turned clockwise. These things are turned the opposite way so you gotta use your left hand, at least if you're as uncoordinated as I am.

The fateful day arrives. I show up at the saloon (crew lounge) and the arcade is unplugged right as I enter. The music screeches to a halt and everyone stares up at me for a moment. I make my way to the seat where the tests are handed out. 6 pages of minutiae about every aspect of safety and emergency protocol. Fire classes, types of extinguishers, emergency codes, muster station locations, roll around and around in my barren, sleep deprived head like tumbleweeds.

After finishing the exam, we had to have the examiner (the same lecturer from the safety course who's name and what he does on the ship I'm supposed to know but don't) look it over. My turn came up and we sat across from each other at one of the lopsided, uneven tables in the lounge with 4 aluminum legs that come together at the middle before speading out in 4 directions once on the floor. That, along with the laquered tribal design of the table, and the way it leans to one side while the ship rocks makes it look like a smushed mushroom.

Tension. He doesn't say a word while he looks over the test. Occasionally he shoots me a look of surprise and continues reading. Did I get something wrong? Why does he turn the pages so violently? He continues reading and re-reading my exam, bobbing his head up and down rhythmically as if he were listening to hip hop on an invisible pair of headphones. Then came the questions. Stuff I got right, he asked. Stuff I didn't know, he asked. Did I really get that one right? Did I really get that one wrong? One after the other. Keeping me off balance. I think he asked about the different fire classes, which I knew. Then he followed up with which letter corresponded to which type of fire, which I wasn't so sure of.

"Uhhhh, A is solid, B is combustible liquid, I think C is electrical, right?"
to which he immediately responded,

"What is this? You ask-uh ME the questions now? I ask-uh the questions!! YOU ANSWER THE QUESTIONS!" pounding the psychadelic mushroom table for emphasis.

He had me demonstrate how to operate the fire doors and locate the weather doors and a bunch of other things. Then he asked me to get the fire extinguishers out of the nearby closet. He asked me how you use them, to which I responded some lame faxsimile of the P.A.S.S. method we were taught. That's Pull out the pin, Aim at the fire, Spray said fire, then Sweep the stream left to right.

"Show me," he said.

I pulled out the pin, picked up the fire extinguisher and pretend aimed and sprayed and sweeped at the imaginary fire.

"I SAID SHOW ME," he said louder.

So I started spraying and sweeping for real in front of everyone. For those of you who have never sprayed a fire extinguisher, those suckers are LOUD and the spray goes everywhere and smells funny. After a second or two I stopped this demonstration. At the moment I stopped, he yelled out,

"DON'T STOP! KEEP-UH GOING!"

I did

"THAT'S IT! DO IT!!! KEEP-UH GOING! KEEP-UH GOING!"

As I sprayed the extinguisher left and right, left and right. The spray hitting his shoes and legs and the door and everything. For like 15-20 seconds I sprayed while he shouted encouragement, his face a mix of a drill sergeant's intense demeanor and a childlike excitement of getting to shoot something loud and messy indoors.

What day is it?

It's a question that I'm asking less and less. The whole 5 day/5 day/4 day cruise schedule eliminates the whole concept of weekends, the Sabbath, TGIF, bad cases of the Mondays, humps days, and replaces them with a constant state of timelessness. Nobody knows the date or day and once we leave port, cellphones can no longer tell us. Everyone just surrenders to it. It's like that dude who lived in a cave for a year. Not knowing what day it is, what time it is, or where you are can be liberating. The only days that provide any temporal inertia are the 2nd and 4th Sundays of each month when we get paid. The other day that kinda breaks up the monotony is the one which has a formal night attached to it. Formal nights are where the staff members are required (if we're in passenger areas) to wear suits, or tuxedos, or dresses after 5 PM and the staff is magnanimously allowed to hang out at the Electricity Discoteque although we can't sit on the barstools or stand next to them.



Work weeks (I guess they're not really weeks) slowly and rhythmically rock back and forth like the ship at sea. Port days, sea days, Cozumel days, Progresso days all melt into one another seamlessly. It's like Groundhog day without the moral lessons to be learned or the tacked on romantic subplot.

The gig itself

The gigs with the trio are going well. My fingers look like a Warner Bros. character after he or she gets hit in the hand with a mallet, anvil, or piano. 4 and a half hour gigs each night are no joke on the upright bass if you're out of practice.

We play at this cigar bar on the ship. It's one of the only places indoors where folks are allowed to smoke. It's also the only place with big screen TV's, which poses a problem when Monday Night Football or LSU games are on during our gigs. They asked us to stop Monday Night after a couple songs to placate the numerous Cowboys fans who were tired of my bass obscuring their
view of Tony Romo throwing countless interceptions :-)

I enjoyed the night off while the other guys in the trio were pretty angry about getting told to stop playing. It's nice to know that the guys are so hungry to play. Maybe when my hands stop throbbing, I'll be right there with them.

& on the 3rd day.....

I rose again from underneath the uncomfortable flame-retardant sheets and comforter just in time to be late for another day of lectures. I know you're probably thinking to yourself,

"5 hours of safety lectures and corporate videos on such topics as sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, proper use of the fire extinguisher, and the history of the Carnival corporation must be off the chain!"

And you'd be wrong. It's not. It actually sucks. The videos are cheesy and the material is boring. Nobody (lecturers included) wants to be there and for some reason, the lecturers ask tons of questions and will not move on until someone answers. They also wont go on with the lecture until everyone is back from the few breaks that they give us. Of course, nobody answers any of the questions and people straggle in 10 minutes late from each break which prolongs this exquisite agony for the rest of us.

After a while, the instructors got the idea to put in episodes of Mr. Bean (have you heard of this show? It's almost like a British version of Get Smart) on the breaks. Man, did it ever solve the tardiness issue! Who knew that Mr. Bean had such mass appeal? And, more importantly, why? Brits, South Americans, Africans, Indians, Asians, Russians, Scots, Canadians and even the French folks were doubled over in laughter at Bean trying to change pants while driving.

Now I'm studying for this safety test I have to take tomorrow like it's the bar so I wont have to go to any more of these training seminars. It's painful watching the instructors trying to get everyone involved. After watching the video on the importance of smiling and saying hello to every guest in a 10' radius (the video was hilarious. The main character did a parody of the 6th sense but instead of saying "I see dead people", he said "I see rude people". You had to be there.), the instructor tried to get us fired up about being nice to people. She was all like,

"So are we all okay with this? Are we going to give every guest we see a BIG smile?!!!"

[awkward silence and nodding of heads]

"I can't hear you"

[muffled uh-huh's and yeah's barely audible over the hum of the slide projector]

"What about you, Jose? Can I count on you to smile EVERY time you see a guest?!" she said to this Ecuadorian cat who worked in the crew. Jose, who apparently had to work until very late the night before, hadn't said a word all day and looked very sleepy and uninterested. He nodded weakly and quickly resumed staring at the floor as he had been doing for the last 3 hours.

"I can't hear you!" she said in a cheerful voice.

"Jes" he said after 5 seconds of staring at the floor. I think she made him "show off his smile" after this exchange which was just as awkward.

1st impression

First day on the ship.....

THE SHIP

It's pretty overwhelming the number of people. I think there are 3,600 people (guests and employees) total onboard. The gig was okay. We are definitely musical wallpaper. Some extremely drunk people will hang out for a while and listen. Of course, we got the people asking us for Van Halen and Led Zeppelin and one cat wanted to know if we had a guitar and amp for him so he could play some Metallica. He was pretty shocked and disappointed that we didn't and I was definitely bummed out. That would have been killin'. Some people were really complimentary which was a nice bonus. I've done the background music thing for a long time and I am fine with that. The mood of the crowd last night was extremely rowdy due to the LSU game (a ton of N'awlins locals) but it was fun seeing everybody so happy even if they were being hella loud during bass solos.

MY ROOM

My roomate is another musician named Emil. He's from the Phillipines and he play in one of the bands. We stay in a bunk bed (I got the top bunk. Can't remember if that's good or bad) and share the storage equally. The room wasn't as small as I expected. The bathroom is another story. It's smaller than a closet which is about as small as my room was on the train. Right when I opened the door I was assaulted by the stench of old mildew and bodily excrements that haunt a tiny unventilated room like them ghosts in that crappy movie "The Others." The medicine cabinet we share is coated with this brownish gunk. They do have those crazy flushing airplane toilets that are cool. The world would be a better place if all toilets worked like that. Execpt dogs, nobody wants there to be a whole lotta toilet water there and nobody wants to touch the flush handle on a public toilet. Make 'em all have the wall buttons.



ORIENTATION

The newbies had this safety class at 4. After watching a few videos, this cat who was either Italian or Middle Eastern or something started lecturing us on safety. He ended every sentence with "hmmmmm?". He also had this weird way of pronouncing certain words, particularly the ones he used over and over again. Like, when he said "emergency", he put an accent on the 1st syllable and a big accent on the 3rd syllable so it sounded like eh-mer-GEN-cy. When he said "the lifejacket", he said Duh life-uh ja-CKET-uh. He'd be all like,

"So its-uh very important you knowah to use-uh the life-uh ja-CKET-uh in case-uh dee eh-mer-GEN-cy. Hmmmmmm? Very important for the eh-mer-GEN-cy traning you-ah know dis. Hmmmmmm? I teach you to use-uh the life-uh ja-CKET-uh now. Hmmmmmmm? In-uh case-uh de e-mer-GEN-cy, you will be glad you know how to use-uh the life-uh-ja-CKET-uh. Hmmmmmm?"

It was pretty funny. I will try to keep writing as much as I can. See you next time.