Working on cruise ships is truly an addiction and trying to quit is like kicking a drug habit. "I swear this is my last contract" is a commonly heard phrase thrown around cruise employees but it's just a lie we repeat, trying to believe it. Just like when you're hungover and you tell yourself that you're never drinking again. The first step towards recovery is to admitting you have a problem. I will try and explain the addiction that once controlled my life. It's actually very hard to adjust to ship life. After a while though, you find your feet. The new, unusual and daunting parts of the job start to become more routine and mundane. You make friends. Though you’re exhausted, you go to some parties, you start to enjoy the perks, and eventually, just when you thought you’d never get off the ship, you find yourself posing for the same type of pictures that lured you there. Somehow, despite yourself, you really start to enjoy yourself …while simultaneously still hating certain aspects of the job. It was always an ongoing joke that the ship was nicknamed the "floating prison".
After a long day exploring the current port you are at, whether that's hiking to the Lost City of Petra or desperately running around looking for an Internet cafe to catch up on everyone else's normal lives at home; half of you is excited to get back to your "home" and the other half doesn't know when you will be able to get off the ship again. There is literally not enough time for you to get enough sleep, have friends, leave the ship occasionally, and do your job well (or even two of the above) and yet somehow we do. And we do it with smiles on our exhausted faces because we’re in hospitality and it’s part of the job. Yes, you get to see the world, but even though you look really happy in those pics, you never get to fully relax without watching the clock. Likewise, you meet amazing people, they become your friends, your ship-family, sometimes a romantic partner, but hanging above each of your heads is a sign-off date, beyond which there are no guarantees you’ll ever see each other again. It’s like ‘ship life’ gives you a little taste of some of the most amazing things the world has to offer without ever allowing you to fully revel in it or claim it as your own. Regardless of who you are and how long you’ve been at this, when you are nearing the end of your contract, you will start to go a little crazy. Your temper gets significantly shorter, being polite to rude guests becomes harder, and you start counting down the days to vacation. If you extend your contract or if your contracts are longer than six months, after this point it is not pretty. You start snapping at your friends. Any unexpected hiccups or extra duties require more energy than you have left. After working seven days a week, on a giant floating hotel with intoxicated vacationers asking the same (often stupid) questions every cruise and being rude to you when you try to help them, reaching levels of exhaustion even parents of newborns can’t fathom, being away from your family, in an existence so far removed from reality that your life seems in limbo except it’s not, you get to the point where you just can't take it anymore. Then, your sign-off date arrives, you hug your friends and colleagues-turned-family good-bye and you leave a piece of your heart behind. You find yourself simultaneously desperate and reluctant to see the end.
Once you have woken up from your semi-coma (you take a few days to sleep), you reconnect with your friends and family and eat all of the food you missed on the ship. You cherish the memories that you made, but you cannot fathom putting yourself through that ever again.
Once you try and go cold turkey, you're life is good for about 30 minutes.
Then, you start going through all of the withdrawal symptoms:
-Smiling and greeting strangers when you walk through your local shopping mall.
-Feeling for your name badge every time you leave your house.
-Repeatedly referring to your bedroom as your ‘cabin’.
-Sweating, vomiting, seizures and hallucinations. No wait, that’s something else.
As you start to remember how to live on land again, a restlessness sets in. The pace of real life suddenly seems awkwardly slow. You are confronted with this huge vacuum of nothingness where the crazy intensity of life in a floating metal pressure cooker that is ‘ship life’ used to be …and you start to miss it.
After a few weeks, when you can’t come up with a decent plan B, when every job out there seems boring, when life seems so painfully slow and you’re missing your ship family, the nights you got no sleep, and the crazy things you did on port days, when you remember how much life on land sucks, (and there aren’t even any Latin boys in South Africa!) you start drafting that email that you know you have to send one month before your expected return to either confirm or cancel your next contract.
You feel like a mermaid (or merman): One part fish, one part woman, torn between land and sea, family and independence, roots and wings. (Okay, mermaids have neither roots nor wings, but you get the picture.) The more you nurture the one half of you, the more the other pines for attention. The idea of ever finding completeness again seems impossible. The only thing worse than being this restless, the only thing worse than being torn between these two worlds, is only knowing one of them.
SECRET LIFE BELOW DECKS
We often work long hours
- After the first month of working on ships I would have sold my left kidney to go back to a normal 5 day a week 9-5 job. Yes you trade your sanity to see the world but after working 7 days a week for 6 months straight with no days off - you go a little crazy. You only get a day off if you're in quarantine. 48 hours of no human contact and not allowed to leave a small cabin in the depths of the ship and no internet -- I would rather be working. Since working on a monthly wage, getting paid for overtime is non existent. An "easy" work week would be 60 hours of fake smiling and dealing with difficult guests. Ha. And trying to keep up with guest demands sometimes means pulling all nighters. A typical photographers wage is 900$ a month -- which is around 20$ a day. I felt like I was living in "Extreme Couponing" trying to make every dollar count. You die a little inside when you spend a full days worth of work to pay for a decent meal or Starbucks. At the end of your contract you don't really end up saving that much money. You spend most of your money on experiences because that's why you're there in the first place right? Even if it means spending your entire months pay on going sky diving in Dubai or riding an airplane over the great barrier reef. Its worth it.
Crew Members party even harder than you do
-When you're a guest on a cruise ship you may feel like you don't have room to roam and fear of cabin fever may set in. But guests have so many activities that you forget that you're in the middle of the ocean. But as crew... We are only allowed in guest areas when there are no guests in that area. 1 a.m. seems to be the golden hour. So the only place available for the crew at all times is...... The Crew Bar. This is always the hangout and where all the parties are. But the best part is the cost of drinks. At 20 cents a drink, you can get drunk with 3$. But there is a catch. There is a strict drinking rule. This can lead to random breathalyzing on the M1. And if you get caught that means immediate termination and you are required to disembark the ship the next port no matter where you are in the world and you have to find your own way home. Its a thrilling game to play.
Doing laundry should be an olympic sport
-Crew members do accumulate laundry even if we wear the same uniform each day. Laundry day is a science that you have to learn. With around 2000 or more crew members, only a few laundry rooms, trying to do laundry around your work schedule, AND it is typical for a number of the washers and dryers to be out of service. Doing laundry is probably the most stressful part of working on ships. Its like Disneyland. There are going to be peak times which you need to avoid. And its trial and error. When you're lucky enough to find a washer thats almost finished or empty and claim that one as your own, its survival of the fittest. You're not safe just because you claimed a washer. There are always an odd number of washers too dryers. So your clothes will end up in odd places if you don't keep an eye on them. You find yourself sprinting back and forth and trying to guesstimate the time left on the machinery that's holding your favorite t-shirt or all your underwear. And when you're stuck on a ship.. you can't really afford to lose articles of clothing. And yes underwear goes missing all the time. Gross. Once the wash is done, now its debating on what to do with someone else's clothes in the finished dryer. It almost becomes normal to be doing your laundry at 3 am.
Ship life is basically high school mixed with jail
-Remember high school, where everyone knew everything about everyone's business? Who was macking whom, cheating on so-and-so, doing this-and-that, being a such-and-such? Well, that's ship life in a nutshell. Don't be surprised if you start hearing your ships drama on other ships. News spreads quickly on the 7 seas. The bar is where we all congregate, it's where we all commiserate. Now, let's add in the jail factor: You're in a tin can and you can't leave. The cabins are about the same size as a 10x10 jail cell. Sharing it with a cell mate with 6months worth of clothes — it gets cozy. Im surprised we didn’t learn how to make prison hooch.
Queen of the vessel
-When you first join on ships you are the shiny new toy. The best thing about ships is that you don’t go in it alone. Everyone knows the feeling of being the new person and adjusting to ship life is extremely difficult so everyone is always attentive. But that newbie attention stops after about a week and transforms into another type of attention. On a ship of 2,000 crew members, more than half of that number is men. And out of that 2,000 about 6 of them are American. Being a blonde, American woman, you can imagine what other crew members will do to get you’re attention. That means free coffee, better food made by the chefs that cook for the captain, and special treatment. You’re almost treated like a guest.
When the food is quality for a federal prison, the coffee is watered down dirt (or if you’re feeling boujie, you can spend 8$ on a small cup of coffee from the guest area — and this is WITH crew discount), and no guest privileges, this new found attention can be used to your advantage. Now with this new invisible crown — Gourmet food is delivered to you during your lunch/dinner hour, free guest coffee, and the ability to use the guest movie theater to catch up on Game of Thrones. You are not allowed many freedoms so I took advantage. I knew how the system worked and I became Queen.
Relation"ships"
-There is no such thing. Speed dating is the only thing that comes close to what resembles “dating” on ships. People come and go so quickly. One contract ends another begins. But the hook ups continue because ships get lonely and it passes the time. The more risqué side of this is those few higher up that pay for sex. And they pay well. Im talking about $5,000 per encounter. That price includes the secrecy of what happens behind closed port holes. You feel like you’re living inside a reality TV show. Desperate housewives of the high seas.
Piracy is a form of currency
-Everyone thinks that since we work on a cruise ship that it’s basically a vacation. No. We aren’t allowed guest privileges. The crew bar does get boring after a while. And you can’t mindlessly scroll thru instagram because the wifi is non existent. The only thing on crew tv is the weather channel or a movie in Spanish on a loop. Entertainment is a must for survival on ships or you just end up spiraling or day drinking. For the lucky few that are able to get off on a port day and find decent wifi is sent on a very important mission. To download the latest movies and tv shows. And yes sometimes that means downloading movies sometimes in a quality that looks like it was filmed in a movie theater on an iPhone. When you can’t have a normal day out in 6 months that means you can’t go to the movies. When you find out that someone has a hard drive with new movies and the latest episode of Game of Thrones - you get waitlisted until its your turn to copy all the goods to your own computer. Or you can trade. Similar to the prison system, money doesn’t go far on ships - you trade one good for another.
Man Overboard
- It is no secret that there are deaths on board. Yes every ship is equipped with a state of the art morgue in an undisclosed location. A lot of guests will go on longer cruises knowing that they will spend their final moments there. To be honest, cruising around and being catered to sounds a hell of a lot better than any retirement home. But there are the few deaths where there is no body. It is common where people will jump over board. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of 2000 guests so when one goes missing, no one really finds out until we are in port. The police would have to do a formal investigation until it’s cleared that the body is somewhere in the Atlantic.