Carinval Glory - NYC to New England... A Memoir

[Delta Hotel]

I had an interesting conversation with our head waiter, Sentil. Remember that he’s Indian, so you have to read his parts with your best Indian accent, preferably out loud. Nevermind that “preferably” stuff – it’s mandatory. You must read Sentil’s lines out loud, with an Indian accent. I’ll keep it short in case your Indian accent is really bad. I’ve been working on mine for years, so I must admit, it’s quite good. In case you care, my accent is modeled after the Bombay accent, which is quite different than the Bengal accent.

 

It started about 8 years ago when I began spending more and more time on the phone with Cisco tech support in India. For the first 6 months, they had to repeat everything at least twice before I either understood them, or gave up trying and just discarded the tiny morsels of information I had gathered from their broken words. By the end of the first year, I was able to get through an entire 2 hour support session without having to ask them to repeat anything! I had also learned a bunch of their names, family members, learned about cultural differences, and a lot about their jobs… which happened to be a lot like mine, but much more boring.

 

Now when I talk to someone in India, the new guys in my office make fun of me for having an Indian accent. I found that they have an easier time understanding ME when I fake an accent! I’m fascinated with accents. If you ever get the chance to talk to someone with a foreign accent, and feel comfortable doing this – ask them to speak to you with an American accent. If you’re not American, ask them to fake an accent of your home country, if they can. Even if it doesn’t work out, it’ll be funny.

 

Ok, so here’s what I remember of our little conversation, remember to read out loud, with the accent. If you want to do an accent for my parts, use your best Maryland accent… whatever that is. Remember – read aloud with your best Indian accent. It’s mandatory.

 

Me: “So, Sentil, how does the 3 waiter system work? We’re used to the 2 waiter system on other ships.”

Sentil: “Well sir, we now have one head waiter, and two assistant waiters. We used to have one head waiter and one assistant waiter for 20 guest. Now, we have one head waiter and two assistant waiter serving 30 guest.

Me: “That sounds about the same to me – 10 guests per waiter. Does it help make things better?”

Sentil: “Well… [unusually long pause], the problem now is that we have 33 waiter per station, when we used to have 22 waiter per station. It gets very crowded at our stations now.”

Me: “Do you like the new 3 waiter system?”

Sentil: “Oh dear Sir, there are SO many thing that I cannot tell you. Would you like your Indian food every night?”

Me: “Uh, yes. Every night, please.”

 

So, my take on this three-waiter system is that it has nothing to do with service, but it’s just another cut-back on spending. They have the same number of staff for the same number of passengers, but they cut out head waiters, which I’m assuming cost more to train and maintain. I’ve never been successful in finding out what kind of salaries these guys make, but SOME DAY … I’ll give up trying.

 

So, it’s still 10 guests per staff, but if the dining room has 1,000 guests, that’s 100 staff members. Using the two-waiter system, you’d have 50 head waiters and 50 assistants. With the three-waiter system, you’ve got 33 head waiters, and 66 assistants and one guy that walks around in a gold vest looking busy, which depending on their compensation system, could be a considerable cost savings across a fleet of ships. It sounds like something a bunch of expensive suits in a board room would think up without really knowing what it means to the actual people sitting in the MDR. As a side note, I call these “f**k - f**k meetings”. Mostly because it’s normally hours of wasted time with people trying to justify their salaries and f**king other people in the process. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve attended my fair share of these meetings, and probably did my share of f**king people over, too… I was just mentioning my funny little name for the meetings, not necessarily my position or feelings on those meetings.

Edited July 14, 2011 by Delta Hotel

[Delta Hotel]

After dinner, we wanted to go explore the ship a little more… but we were too tired. As you’ve probably already read, we got up around 4AM, drove to NYC, dragged kids around, and followed parents on a ship, took a thousand pictures (give or take 8 pictures) and then had dinner. We were exhausted.

 

It was still too early for bed, so Wifey’s parents invited us back to their room just so we could see it. Like I said, it was a balcony room. Their room was 7220, and was very similar to the Ocean View that we had, except it had a door where we had a wall… and you can walk through that door onto a balcony which roughly measured 4 feet by 9 feet.

 

Here’s the view from their balcony as we’re leaving New York.

We spent a few minutes in their room, then decided that we’d rather be in ours. There’s only so many things you can do while standing in someone else’s cabin surrounded by their luggage.

 

We went back to the room, continued to unpack and set up the room. My major contribution to this effort was mostly staying out of the way, and being very diligent about keeping my feet and shoes on the luggage mat at the end of the bed.

 

I decided to settle into the room as well. I went to the bathroom and unpacked my bath-bag. My bath-bag is green with black piping around the edges. It’s about 5 inches by 5 inches, and about 10 inches long. It has two zippers that run parallel to each other down the length of the bag. If you open the two sides of the bag, you’ll find that there’s a nylon partition between the two sides. However, the partition “wall” doesn’t go all the way to the bottom of the bag, there’s a gap at the bottom so that things can move from one compartment to another as the bag moves. I mean… *****? Why even HAVE the wall in the middle? Why even have two zippers? It just makes my brain work excessively hard trying to remember which side my toothpaste is on, just to then remember that – it doesn’t even matter! It might be on either side at this point. On top of all of that – the bag is almost completely symmetrical which means that even if I remembered which side it was on AND it managed to stay on the correct side – I would most likely chose the wrong side anyway because they look exactly the same. Stupid bag.

 

Most people have one of these bags for travelling. I would guess that normal people pack their various bathroom items into one of these bags shortly before a trip, take it on the trip, use it, then unpack it when they get home. Not I, said the lazy cruiser. My wife bought this bath bag for me years ago – which cruise, I don’t remember. But, she got me one of these because she was tired of seeing me throw all of my bath stuff into a plastic shopping bag, tie it up, and toss it into my suitcase. I suppose it did look a little gypsy-like or something. It also looked bad having a WalMart bag of stuff sitting on the vanity in the cabin. Anyway, she got me a bath-bag to help me join the higher echelons of society. Well, boy did that back-fire on her. Not only did I love this bath-bag for travelling, I decided that it was also very convenient for using at home in our bathroom. So now, all year long, cruise or no cruise, my green two-zipper piece-of-crud designed bath-bag sits next to my bathroom sink. This does double-duty now. For 48-50 weeks of the year, this darling little bag sits in my bathroom and holds all of my stuff, and when it’s time for those other 2-4 weeks each year, all I have to do is drop my razor into it, zip up both sides, and go. I even keep one or two soap bars in the bag from various places. When we go to a hotel or on a cruise, I’ve found that I generally prefer their soap to the ones my wife buys. I like the kind of soap that just wants to be soap, and nothing else.

 

I think of soap as something to get the dirt and sweat off of me, and if it’s done its job properly, there should be nothing but squeaky-clean skin left. If possible, I’d like my soap to reach into my skin and drag out the oils and sweat that would normally come out for the next 2 hours. I actively despise the kinds of soap that refuse to leave your skin. They’re usually hand soaps, or “moisturizing” soaps. Often, I’ll be in a public place, or at someone else’s house and use their bathroom soap, only to realize during the rinsing process “you little piece of junk soap… you’re not going to leave, are you?” This comment (occasionally out load in a low voice) is usually said or thought with lowered eyebrows and a small snear.

 

I keep rinsing, but I know my hands aren’t clean because they’re still slippery. I know my HANDS aren’t slippery, so it must have made an even swap of dirt for slippy. By the way, “slippy” is the noun form of a slippery substance. I just made that up. I didn’t make up the term “slippy”, I just assigned it to a noun form, which I think is new.

 

Carnival uses the round green soap whose very name welcomes you to wash your hands, face, or other parts. I looooooove this soap. It has a mild, yet pleasant fragrance. It lathers quickly and effectively, and it rinses fast and clean, leaving a nice squeak to my fingers under the water. You don’t hear the squeak, you feel it. Ah, I can feel it now. Squeak squeak…

 

On each cruise, I take the soap from the cabin. If there’s a new one that’s unopened, I’ll drop that in my bag early in the cruise and the steward will replenish later. At the end of the cruise, I’ll usually take the lightly used bars home with me. Wifey provides me with a clean half-sized Ziploc bag to place my soap in. I’ve never asked, but I think she brings an extra one just for me to do this. She’s thoughtful like that.

 

So, back to the story. I go into the bathroom, unzip my bath-bag, pull out my toothbrush and toothpaste, turn around, and drop it into the multi-pocket-hanging-shower-organizer that Wifey has mounted in the shower stall. I turn back to my bag, pull out my razor and deodorant and place it on my little elevated glass shelf in the corner near to the turned-over drinking glasses with the paper covers. I then take out my travel pack of Q-Tips and place it on the vanity up against the backsplash so that it’s less likely to get wet from the sink. Have you ever tried to use a wet Q-Tip? It’s not even worth it! The feeling of a cold, wet Q-Tip going into your ear is not worth the crud that you might get out.

[Delta Hotel]

On our cruise, Carnival had apparently bought the rights to the movie "Tangled" and were playing it constantly on every available channel in the cabins. We’ve seen this movie a few times and my girls love it. I think it’s pretty funny, too… but I didn’t really want to watch it 5 more times on our 5 night cruise. I was out-voted. We finished our first night with an uneventful easing into sweet cabin slumber.

 

Oh, I forgot to mention that our uneventful easing into cabin slumber started out with an event, which was anything but easing. We had an adjoining room. This meant that at the foot of our bed was a door in the wall. Not all rooms have this, just some. This door allows you to go from one cabin into the next cabin without having to go into the hallway. The door is less sound-insulated than the normal wall, so we can hear more through the door than a wall. Our neighbors had children, two I believe. They sounded like 8 children, but I only heard the mother and father screaming two names, and only two distinguishable screams when they were beaten. The younger of the two kids (both boys) would cry and scream non-stop. The parents didn't seem to care that he was screaming and crying. I think they were from the school of "self soothers" or "don't give into them when they throw a tantrum". They were also door and cabinet slammers... and the parents yelled at each other... and it sounded like the kids were making a game of "what's the largest object I can throw at the neighbor's wall". Eventually, they calmed down, and so did we. Maybe Wifey didn't, but I was alseep by then, so I don't know if she was still awake or not. Ah... sweet slumber.

Our first night’s towel animal

Edited July 14, 2011 by Delta Hotel

[Delta Hotel]

Day 2 – Day at Sea

 

Good morning! Well, not really. I was going to start this chapter with the sound of a cabin phone ringing, but I can’t quite think of how to spell that sound. It’s a muted kind of tone-beeping. Almost like you put your home telephone on pulse dial, hooked it up to an amplifier, and blasted it through the small room. It’s about 8:20AM. The phone’s ringing. I get up, stagger out of bed, step on a few kid toys that stab the bottoms of my feet. Luckily, I was wearing two pairs of white tube socks, so it didn’t hurt too bad. I pick up the pulsating/beeping/ringing phone and answer.

 

Me: [Grumbly slurred voice] “Hello.”

Dad: “Hey, you guys have breakfast yet?”

Me: “No, we’re all still sleeping.”

Dad: [laughs] “We’ve been up, read a book, had breakfast, sat by the pool, and came back to the room!”

Me: [silence while waiting for Dad to get to the point of the phone call]

Dad: “Why don’t you guys get up, get breakfast, and come find us. I need a drink, and I can’t put it on your room card without you.”

Me: “Ok. Call you in a while.”

 

More background here… the “I need a drink” line stems from a previous arrangement. June 19th, 2011 happened to be Father’s Day this year. Before getting on the ship, it was agreed that Dad’s father’s day gift (in addition to the free cruise) was that we’d pay his bar tab for the day. He made it clear that he was going to make full use of this deal, starting immediately after breakfast.

 

I stumble to the bathroom, ALMOST stub my toe on the step up to the bathroom, and do my morning routine. I know that I promised all kinds of minutia in the first paragraph, but as Wifey attempts to bring me up in society, I’m learning to leave some things out of polite conversation.

 

I come out into the cabin, inform Wifey of what her father said, and pick up my camera. One of my eyes hasn’t fully opened yet because of how incredibly early it is (8:25AM), but luckily the one that IS open is my right-eye, which is the only one I need to take pictures.

 

I snap this photo of the girls still sleeping in their beds.

 

The things on the top rail of the upper bed are her Barbies. She made Ken and Barbie little beds up there, and used tissues for blankets.

Wifey got both girls a messenger style bag to put their toys in. If they can't fit it in the bag, it doesn't go on the ship. Also, they have to carry the bags, so no bricks, rocks, or bags of sand.

 

 

I would have called them bunk beds, but I don’t think that name qualifies because they’re not attached to each other at all. The lower bed is made out of the couch along the wall, and the upper bed is dropped out of the ceiling and hangs from a metal support system. When we first came into the cabin the day before, we didn’t even notice the Pullman bed in the ceiling. We’re used to the other ships which had a fold-up bed attached to the wall above the couch. There’s actually a painting on the wall behind the metal bed frame. The room steward lowered the bed last night.

Edited July 14, 2011 by Delta Hotel

[PalmettoNative]

Normally, I would continue to be the adult, and pretend that I was well above such simple taunting. However, I am on vacation. I glanced around to see who was around, turned back to the glass, and discretely stuck my tongue out at the boy. The boy came closer to the glass and stuck his tongue out as far as he could. I thought to myself “ah, yes… now I’ve got him, he’s just bacteria covered putty in my hands”. Again, I glanced around to see who was nearby – no one. My daughter is standing on the steps nearby, but facing away from me. I quickly lean toward the glass, pretend to lick the window in a quick movement. As planned, the boy couldn’t resist… he leaned forward and stuck his tongue on the glass and began to lick up and down on the window making slug trails as he moved along. As soon as the boy’s tongue touched the glass, I turned and walked away. Yes, yes, yes… I know that I was inciting the misbehavior of a child. Yes, I know that I shouldn’t feel proud in being able to trick an 8 year old into licking a window. Yes, I also know that I, for a brief moment, acted childish… I know you are, but what am I?

 

Just finished page 1 and this is by far the greatest thing so far...I would have done the same...but as he was licking the glass I would have probably slapped the glass and walked away :D

[cherylroslyn]

This is not a review......its a freaking sitcom.

 

 

The autopsey line was probably funnier than any line I ever heard on Seinfeld or Everybody Loves Raymond......HILARIOUS!!!!!

 

 

But your in-laws take the cake.........they are funny without even trying.........I loved the phone call for the drink..........you probably have a lot of people thanking God for their own in-laws....as flawed as they may be.......and that is not meant to be insulting to them or your wife......they are just very "unique".......

[JPH814]

. At first, I had misjudged which way was forward, because the ship was backing out of its parking spot at the docks. So, I initially headed toward the side of the ship facing New Jersey. When I got there, I asked myself “I wonder why 95% of the people up here are on the other side of the ship?” Right as I asked myself that question, I heard a beautiful young passenger (also known as my wife) ask a crew member “which side do we see the Statue of Liberty on?” To which he replied “Dat side. Statue on dat side.” Needless to say, “dat side” was accompanied by a finger pointing gesture which indicated that the 95% of people on this deck were already aware of this fact. I was on the wrong side. Then I asked myself “do all of the people on THIS side know that they won’t be seeing the Statue? Are they intentionally on the wrong side? Whatever, that’s 5% less people to fight over a railing space.” I walked to the other side with my family.

 

 

Quick question: Is the statue on the port (Left facing forward) or starboard (right facing forward) side of the ship?

[spacepotatoes]

This is great, Delta! I love the writing. Between your "memoirs" and Kokomo_Man's live review, I don't need to bother with my actual books :)

[australian_girl]

I am thoroughly this!

[SailBadtheSinner]

JPH814 asked: ....Is the statue (SOL) on the port or starboard?....

 

When you are departing from NYC, the SOL is on your starboard. If you are departing from Bayonne, NJ, SOL is up river from where you are docked, but can be seen from an upper deck.

 

 

SBtS

 

 

 

[Delta Hotel]

Quick question: Is the statue on the port (Left facing forward) or starboard (right facing forward) side of the ship?

 

Well, isn't that embarassing... I spent the time to write a small book about passing the statue, but never actually mentioned which side it was on. As you're facing forward, and the ship is moving down the river, the Statue comes along the right side of the ship. Of course, it's on the left side coming back to port, but that occurs at some crazy hour of the morning... like 6 or 7AM.

[halos]

He really did say it to her, just like that. I was there. He didn't miss a beat - his comedic timing was perfect.:cool: It was like a sit-com script.:p

 

My mother has repeated the story to everyone she knows.:rolleyes:

 

It was one of the funniest things I have ever read on here :D

This review is fabulous.

[Delta Hotel]

I am thoroughly this!

 

Thanks, Rachel! I'm am thoroughly this, as well! And the positive feedback has been very!

 

Delta =)

[mom22tinks]

Loving the review! Please tell me the pseudonym you write under. Would love to read your books ;) Hurry up and continue I can't wait to hear the rest. And somehow I just can't imagine Canada being exciting.... Looking forward to the rest!

[Delta Hotel]

Loving the review! Please tell me the pseudonym you write under.

 

Please don't tell anyone because this is a secret... but my pseudonym is Delta Hotel. I get that a lot, people think that's my real name, but it's not. It's ok... honest mistake, I'm sure. I also occasionally publish under my other pen name, Anita Shreve. Again, that's a secret... don't tell.

 

Again, I'm flattered by your interest in my 5-day memoir. I can't stand reading, and I'm barely literate... just ask my wife/Editor. I have to ask her to help me spell any words over two syllables! I just had to look up how to spell "syllable". Seriously... that's a hard word to spell.

Edited July 15, 2011 by Delta Hotel

[Delta Hotel]

Wifey gets up and does her morning routine. I pull off my sleeping-socks, and quickly replace them with a fresh pair of dark green, medium-thickness socks. These aren’t the shiny go-to-dinner socks, just dull dark green socks. All of my socks come to just below the knees. I don’t even know why they make mid-calf socks for men; they just ride down to your ankles when you start walking. I haven’t graduated to the sock-garters yet, but I aspire to have them by the time I’m 50. I’m 31 now, and I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I mean, if I just go out and start wearing sock-garters at 31, what’s there to look forward to later when I’m 50?

 

While Wifey is in the shower, or doing whatever it is that she does in there, I pull out my laptop and see if I can get a wireless signal at sea. My Verizon AirCard can reach about 10-15 miles to a cell tower over water. It’s a low signal, but it works. In the past, the ships seem to stay about 15-20 miles off coast as they go north and south along the east coast. I thought I might have a chance. No go, didn’t work… and I never pay for the yes-we-have-satellite-internet-at-sea-but-you’re-going-to-pay-through-the-nose service on the ship, and I hope I never have to. On this particular cruise, the ship swings way out into the ocean, almost due east for a long time, then hooks up north. I get internet in most ports that have a cellular network that supports data plans, so it’s not a big deal. So, I put my laptop away and begin to annoy my daughters.

 

I like to wake them up by singing impromptu songs about waking up. The songs are always embedded into the tunes of other well-known songs that I don’t know the name of. One of my standard songs goes to the tune of something that sounds like “da da da boom dee-yay, da da da boom dee-yay”. I’m pretty sure that those aren’t even the real words/lyrics to the song, but that’s all I know. If you happen to know that song or tune, good for you. It’ll make this next part a little more cohesive.

 

So I start singing in a low voice, and then get louder with each line. As I sing the song to them, I climb on top of their sheets, wrap up their little bodies in the blanket like a ball of laundry and cradle them like a little baby. This is usually also accompanied by kisses on their face, or the tops of their heads because they’re usually trying to bury their faces into the blankets and whining about sleeping and bright light.

 

The song often goes like this – but I change the words each time, not to be spontaneous, but because I can’t remember what I sang last time.

It’s wakey wakey time! It’s wakey wakey time! It’s time to get-out-of-bed, it’s time to go outside.

It’s brushy brushy time, it’s brushy brushy time, it’s time to brush your teeth, it’s time to go potteeee…

You need to get-out-of-bed, you need to put-on-some-clothes, if you don’t get-out-of-bed, I’m going to grab your feet.

And pull you out of bed, and you know I will, so you should get-out-of-bed, before I lick your face…

 

Normally by now, they’ve both crawled out of their sheets and begun limping toward the bathroom. The 5-year-old still runs into things sometimes when she’s sleepy, and its exaggerated in the cabin where she’s not familiar with the room.

 

Wifey and I get dressed while we remind the girls to get dressed. They seem to have about a 30 second attention span when it comes to anything other than playing. They’re not bad at all, they’re actually really quite good… but they do get distracted easily. It’s common to see them playing with a shirt but no pants, or one sock without the other, or clopping around with one shoe because they were in the middle of doing something and saw a toy, bug, piece of fuzz, or pretty much anything at all which they feel is more exciting than their current task.

 

Eventually, all four of us are dressed enough to be presentable for the breakfast buffet. We’ve only done the MDR for breakfast a couple of times in the past. With kids, it’s just not worth the struggle that early in the morning to manage the early-morning surge of energy that’s been building up for 10 or more hours. The waiting and sitting still in the MDR is much more manageable in the evenings. Maybe Wifey has a different reason, but this is my reason… not to mention that normally when we get up, we’re barely able to make to breakfast because of how late we’ve slept. Lucky for us, on this cruise, we have Wifey’s parents to help wake us up each morning… WHEW! And to think that I almost had to sleep in for 5 days straight while on vacation… could you imagine the damage that would cause? Thank goodness for in-laws.

 

Breakfast is always interesting with my girls. Wifey needs hot tea and protein (eggs, bacon, ham, etc…) in the morning. Daughter #1 always wants to eat the sugar-laden cereals with a Danish of some kind. Daughter #2 doesn’t want to eat anything, but is willing to compromise and eat cereal and some bacon. I don’t like eating early in the morning, and I don’t like breakfast foods. I’d rather eat pizza, fries, a hot dog, or hamburger than eat eggs, muffin, and bacon. Which, luckily for me, is usually available in the morning in the buffet. I also like eating croissants, a lot. I find that eating breakfast in the early morning makes me hungrier earlier.

 

During the normal work-week, I don’t eat breakfast at all. And I like to push lunch off as late as I can – sometimes not eating lunch until 4-6PM to get the most bang for meal. It’s less of a “saving money” thing, and more of a “I don’t like to feel weighed down by a bunch of food, which makes me feel lazy and sleepy” thing. I drive a lot for my work, and move around a lot… lots of walking, carrying stuff, and trying to pretend that I’m glad to see people that I work with. Pretending to be cheerful is hard work, and exhausting. If I had a full stomach, I feel less like putting up with their crap… and more likely to tell them how I really feel about their problems. Again, I’ll omit my feelings here for the sake of polite conversation.

 

[mom22tinks]

Please don't tell anyone because this is a secret... but my pseudonym is Delta Hotel. I get that a lot, people think that's my real name, but it's not. It's ok... honest mistake, I'm sure. I also occasionally publish under my other pen name, Anita Shreve. Again, that's a secret... don't tell.

 

Again, I'm flattered by your interest in my 5-day memoir. I can't stand reading, and I'm barely literate... just ask my wife/Editor. I have to ask her to help me spell any words over two syllables! I just had to look up how to spell "syllable". Seriously... that's a hard word to spell.

 

lol I am so happy your parents didn't name you after an aging airline and dirty room after all...whew! What a relief! Perhaps your real name is more inspiring :)

[Crusin Karen]

Oh, this is just too hilarious. I LOVE the autopsy remark and too funny that your MIL calls you son in law. Thanks for sharing this with us and can't wait to read the rest of it. Nice you treated your in laws to the cruise AND all inclusive Father's Day for your FIL too...:eek:

[ShakyBeef]

lol I am so happy your parents didn't name you after an aging airline and dirty room after all...whew! What a relief! Perhaps your real name is more inspiring :)

 

Here's the story behind his CC screen-name:

 

Last year, he joined our roll call (I was a CC member, he was not) and started posting ridiculous, obnoxious comments under the alias Delta Hotel. I caught onto him pretty quickly. DH = Dear Husband (in CC forum lingo) = Delta Hotel (in phonetic code alphabet).:rolleyes::p

[Delta Hotel]

After breakfast, we run into Mom and Dad. I can’t remember if they found us on Lido Deck, or if we found them wandering aimlessly around the ship. We corral the kids, shove their Barbie doll, horses, unicorns, Legos, crayons, pencils, unidentified broken pieces of other toys, and notepads into their toy bag and start pushing the backs of their heads down the hall in the general direction of the aft deck of Lido. By the way, this is where the Adults-Only swimming pool and hot tubs are. Surrounding the hot tub and pool area is an “almost outdoor” seating area with tables, chairs, the outdoor burger and fries buffet, soft-serve ice cream machine, and a bar. This is also where the pizzeria is located. I call this area “almost outdoor” because all of the walls are enclosed, and the ceiling is a retractable glass ceiling, which might be open, closed, or partially open/closed, which makes this area “almost outdoor”. This is where we start drinking our Father’s Day away. I get my normal bucket-o-beer. Dad gets his Bailey’s on the rocks, Wifey gets something fruity (probably DOD), and Mom takes a sip of Dad’s Bailey’s and almost passes out.

 

Mom always acts like she wants to drink alcohol, but she and the whole family know that she’s an alcohol-lightweight. She’s more like an alcohol-featherweight. I had offered to pay her bar tab for the ENTIRE cruise as a side-deal attached to the original pancreatic cancer screening.

 

When Mom told us that she was supposed to get tested for pancreatic cancer, the doctor told her that the test consisted of one or two procedures, and depending on the results of those first tests, she may or may not need to have a third procedure… the endoscopy.

 

<Begin misty flashback memory>

 

About 6 years ago, I was at work and began to feel sick. Not just a normal kind of “cough cough, sneeze sneeze” sick, but a real kind of sick… something deep down and very uncomfortable. I happened to be onsite at a client’s office when it happened, and excused myself to the restroom because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I got dizzy, light headed, and very nauseated. I splashed some water on my face and sat in the stall to breathe. I rested for 5 minutes, felt a little better, and decided that I would pull it together long enough to excuse myself from my client’s office. I did so, but they knew that I wasn’t doing well; it was incredibly obvious. One of the managers even pretended to walk out to their car in the parking lot in order to escort me without making me feel escorted. I got in my company car, and began driving back to my office. I held it together for the 5 minute ride back to my office to drop off the car. When I got to my office, I called my wife to come get me and laid myself on the floor of my office between my desk and my chair. Wifey arrives a short while later, helps me into the car, and drives me home. Again, I held it together for the 15 minute ride home, until we got to the traffic light by our house. As soon as we stopped at the light, I reached over, swung the passenger door open, and <polite conversational omission goes here>.

 

The blood was a little alarming… and it freaked Wifey out. Blood? What blood? Sorry, that part was omitted in the polite conversational censorship above. Anyway, there was blood on the road outside my car door, along with everything that I didn’t eat for breakfast. Not a good sign. Wifey turns the car around and takes me to the emergency room. After waiting in the ER waiting room for what felt like an unusually long time, they took me into the ER and had a couple of nurses and doctors check me out.

 

One of the ER nurses takes my blood pressure, then looks at her cuff, then shakes her blood pressure thingy a little, then takes my blood pressure again. Normally, the nurse tells me what the numbers are – this one didn’t. She left the bedside and called over a doctor.

 

The doctor comes over and asks me “do you think you can walk?” To which I replied, “yeah, I think so.” He helps me off of the gurney and asks me to walk around the ER a little. I was very confused. I had come in here because I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to walk around, but since he asked me to, I did. As I walked around the ER, I noticed a few nurses following me, and quietly calling other nurses over to me. I soon had a small herd of nurse groupies following me. Later, I found out that my blood pressure was 66 over 33, which I’m told is pretty close to freakin’ dead. Still not sure what those numbers mean, though. The nurses were amazed that I was conscious, let alone able to walk. I was admitted to the hospital for the next two days.

 

During those two days, I spent most of my time lying in bed, eating amazingly delicious food, and being woken up every 2 hours to make sure that my heart was still working. They did this by sticking a needle in my arm to see if my heart was still able to fill an empty vile. Every time they came in to steal blood, they succeeded.

 

On the second day in the hospital, they wheeled me down to another wing of the hospital. I didn’t see a sign anywhere, but I suspect that it was something like the “Osiris Memorial Torture Wing”. This is where they performed… the endoscopy.

 

I’ll leave out the gory details, but it took 3 men and one “doctor” to perform this procedure. The 3 men held me down, while the “doctor” tried to see inside me with a camera at the end of a garden hose. I put “doctor” in quotes because I’m not sure that he was one. He wore a white coat, but seemed to enjoy the procedure entirely too much.

 

This is how I learned about… the endoscopy.

 

<End misty flashback memory>

 

Back to the side-deal with Mom. When she said that she might have to get an endoscopy as a part of her pancreatic cancer screening, I tried to contain my excitement as I blurted out “If you get an endoscopy, I’ll pay your bar tab for the whole cruise.” She didn’t have to get one after all, but I would have been willing to pay her bar tab for the cruise just to have the satisfaction of knowing that she had gone through… the endoscopy.

[NeuroQueen]

OH MY GOD it is after eleven at night, I have to be up at 5AM!! I can't quit reading this. You are seriously HYSTERICAL!!!!! We need to cruise with you! Are you this funny all of the time? Keep posting. It will make work a lot more fun tomorrow!!! LOVE IT!!!

[ShakyBeef]

OH MY GOD it is after eleven at night, I have to be up at 5AM!! I can't quit reading this. You are seriously HYSTERICAL!!!!! We need to cruise with you! Are you this funny all of the time? Keep posting. It will make work a lot more fun tomorrow!!! LOVE IT!!!

 

 

Yes, this is really how he is all the time. :cool: His sarcastic / dry sense of humour and dead-pan delivery sometimes makes people think he's either crazy or stupid (or both). Life with him is interesting, to say the least.:rolleyes::p

Edited July 15, 2011 by ShakyBeef

[Delta Hotel]

But none of that is important here.

 

 

What’s important now is that we’re on a ship, and I have a bucket of beer. Albeit a heavily over-priced bucket of beer, but a bucket of beer nonetheless. Wifey goes to the bar and orders my bucket of Miller Light, along with her DOD, and Dad’s Bailey’s. I drink a lot of Miller Light at home. I’m not an alcoholic or anything like that, but my mother tells me that I can be anything I want as long as I keep trying. I probably average 1.15 beers per day. Some days, I don’t have any. Other days, I may have 1. And some days, I have… more than 1. Let’s not focus on my drinking habits so much here; the point is that I’m very familiar with the taste of Miller Light. I can easily tell the difference between Miller Light out of a bottle, and Miller Light out of a can. The bottle always has a hard round opening, and the can has a distinctly metal rim.

 

 

On previous cruises, my Millers have come in the plastic bottles made to look like the glass bottles. I didn’t have a problem with the taste of these plastic bottles, but they did seem to warm up much faster than normal bottles or cans. On this Glory cruise, they switched Miller to an all aluminum can with a tapered neck, kind of like the bastard child of a bottle and a can. The caps on these are abnormally hard to twist off. If your hands have any slippy on them at all, the cap becomes a real obstacle between you and your liquid goldness. If that weren’t bad enough, the cans seem to taste funny – not like normal cans or bottles. I think it has something to do with the lack of the special liner inside the cans. Well, that’s enough about my beer can.

 

On the outside of the can, there’s a printed date. As I’m drinking my first beer, Wifey happened to notice that the beer that I pulled out of my bucket had a date which had already passed. It said MAR0511. I thought nothing of it, and assumed it was the born-on date. Wifey gets curious. She pulls another can out of the bucket and looks at it. She then pulls out the other two cans and looks at them. The other three beers had dates in the future – AUG0811. She deduces that the beer that I’m drinking has expired. At $600 per beer ($6 really), we didn’t think that I should put up with expired beer, and it did taste funny. Wifey takes a short walk to the bar and brings the bucket of beers.

 

At the bar are two bartenders, a man and a woman. She brings the bucket up, and politely shows them the expired beer, pointing out the date that has passed. The two bartenders take the can and closely examine the date and can while mumbling to each other in another language. After a few seconds of conference, they look up and come over to Wifey. One of them states with an accent “that is the born-on date”. Wifey politely replies, “That can’t be the born-on date, because these other beers [taking them out of the bucket and holding them forward] have a date in the future. That would mean that these beers are born in the future.” The two bartenders realize the logic-wall they’ve just run into. One of the bartenders walks over to another part of the small deck and calls over the bar manager. The bar manager comes behind the bar with the other two bartenders and they all huddle together talking about the beer can in another language. After a few seconds, the bar manager comes back and says “Yes, maam… this is the born-on date.” Wifey in a moment of frustration, holds up one of the other beers and then says “So, were these ‘born’ in the future?!?!”

We get a replacement beer. That’s a solid “win” for Wifey vs. Carnival Cruise Lines.

[Delta Hotel]

Even on the second day of this cruise, Wifey and I both noticed that the drink waiters are… not around. The few that we do see, never come to us, and we almost have to throw a salt or pepper shaker at them to get their attention. Even those shakers are getting harder to get a hold of! I’ve heard that people take them to their rooms and keep them tied up there in order to fulfill their deepest and darkest room-service desires. I kind of get it. On our last Carnival Pride cruise, we had a balcony suite, and we ordered room service more frequently on that cruise than we did on other cruises. One of my favorite things from that cruise was to order my peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cookie, and have a beer while sitting in the whirlpool tub. Seriously, I did. It was amazing. That was a huge part of my satisfaction with that cruise.

 

Sitting in your own whirlpool tub with the jets going, with a PBJ in one hand, and a beer in the other hand… I cannot explain to you how incredibly liberating this feels. It’s a good thing that I was by myself, because if anyone saw me with a PBJ and a beer in that tub, with that stupid smirk on my face for so long, they might think I was an idiot or something. At several points, I would spontaneously start laughing. Just laughing at the absurdity of the circumstances and the various fateful stepping stones that led me to that particular moment.

 

We had booked the Pride cruise for January of 2011 with a balcony-guarantee (Pack & Go). Exactly one month before our sailing, Wifey gets a call from the Carnival Upsell Fairy, and POOF! A few hundred dollars later, we’re booked in a Ocean Suite! Now, let me explain something about me – because by now, you have no idea how my little brain works… I’m actually very lucky that I’m capable of even typing, because it requires so many coordinated efforts and synapses working together, I don’t know how I’m able to form words on the screen… the magic screen.

 

According to my mother, I’ve really beat the odds, but she tells me that it’s not really surprising. I’ve always been an over-achiever, she tells me. All of the people in the alley that night didn’t think I’d be able to climb out of the dumpster. But, I proved them wrong. They thought that since I was so small, I wouldn’t be able to reach the top of the dumpster wall to pull myself out… and definitely not with that cast on my leg. They weren’t aware of the sliding door on the side of the dumpster. I rolled out, no problem. Ok, if you hadn’t guessed it already, that last part was made up. It was more like falling than rolling.

 

Enough about me and my Glorious Childhood. Back to drink waiters.

 

We had a really hard time getting drinks on this cruise. It was so drastically different than every other cruise that we’ve been on, that we started coming up with conspiracy theories about why this might be. While sitting at a table, thirsty, with empty can-bottles rolling about me, I had time to think. One idea was that Carnival implemented the three-waiter system at the corporate level, which pissed off the waiters on the ship. Then, the waiters went back to their various [insert Country of origin here] mafia groups below decks and spread the word for everyone to start doing a poor job. You see, if the wait staff were to perform poorly as a form of a “strike”, then the wait staff would be singled out, and could be reprimanded or punished for their insolence. However, if all of the departments performed poorly, the officers and corporate “suits” wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the source of declining revenues… they would only know that they had implemented a series of crew changes, and shortly after taking effect, the ships that were affected had started making a lot less money, and received many more complaints across the board.

 

See what happens when you leave a man on a ship without a constant flow of alcohol? He starts thinking, and then no one is better off. Just keep the beer and DODs flowing, and you’ve got a happy floating blob of 3,500 people that don’t ask questions.

Edited July 15, 2011 by Delta Hotel

[jimbo5544]

Great review so far. You have a gift.