Mama said there’d be days like this.

Today was officially my worst day at sea. Right out of the gate I was a 4 whole minutes late for work. I think my “supervisor” was just trying to flex what muscles she has and gave me one of the two verbal warnings before I get written up. The pisser of the whole ordeal is, we were doing the load in we were supposed to do last night, but she was too tired (after her day off) to do. Needless to say, the day was not starting off well.

After loading in the magic show (which in 8 short hours would become my Pandora’s box), I managed to get off the ship and get to the post office. As I stood in line, some cock sure American woman (keep in mind that St. Thomas is a United States Territory) whom I am sure was from the Midwest (the corn hole of America), started calling the nice woman behind the counter (A federal employee) a no good lazy foreign bitch (oh yes she did). The beast proceeded to tell her “youngins” that, “the reason there are mirrors in this place is so the fat lazy woman behind the desk doesn’t have to move her head to see anything”. Even in America, people hate Americans….go figure.

After I posted my letter, I made my way to the cruise center and had some lunch. The Jamaican Jerk sandwich may have well have been the highlight of my day (which is to say, it didn’t kick me in the nuts and laugh). I made a few phone calls, talked to a few good friends, and took a few snapshots before heading back to the ship. Two whole hours off the ship, fantastic!

Back on the ship (and after being violated by another Indian security guard; boy howdy how they take the “frisk” too far) my only goal was to view the tape of the evenings show a few times before I had to run it. I knew I had a tech rehearsal at 5, but I wanted to blow everyone away with my grasp of the show. You will have to keep in mind that this is the show we were supposed to run twice last week, but the magician missed his flight. It is also IMPORTANT to know that the standard training period for a first contract automation technician is four weeks and my trainer left the boat last Saturday (dun dun DUN). Anyway, I put the tape in the player, and guess what? The motherfucking (sorry you of PG tastes, I have no other way of phrasing it...) tape would not play correctly. After about an hour of troubleshooting I realized I needed to fuck with the tracking to get the thing watchable. The cherry on this sundae was that I didn’t have a remote control to do it with, and oh happy day, it was a port day. By some miracle I found ONE person with a remote and was able to fix the problem. After watching the video twice (by the way, the speakers on the TV did not work, so I had to use the headphone jack which only worked when I taped the connector down) I realized the tape they had given me was from 2004.

That did NOT bode well…

The tech rehearsal started and I managed to get though 4 cues before shit started to go pretty fucking haywire. The cue sheet I had was absolutely awful (unless you have seen the show run live more than once and more than twice on a 3 year old video) and I begin to crash and burn. Somehow we got through the rehearsal. We had to cut the cast for dinner so I got another 15 minutes to work through any issues. At that point I was considering taking my chances with the briny deep blue and the always eager hammerhead sharks. Time quickly ran out and the cast was cut for dinner. It was at that moment Seabag was cut loose to fend for himself, armed with a useless video, raw courage, and a cup of rotgut coffee.

Tick tick tick… SHOWTIME! Things are starting to come together and we were 25 minute into the show without a fuck up (a technical term). Then it happened, I brought down a line set on a 12 year old Korean girl in a wheelchair and crushed her to death…. No, not really you bastards, have a little more faith in me than that……but I did manage to miss a pretty major cue (thank you piss poor cue sheets) and almost screw up the entire act. I did recover , the show did go on, but it was the punch in the face I was hoping to avoid. *Show over, nobody dead* Two hours later (with another piss poor comic who decided to go 45 minutes past his time slot) I finally hung up the eye patch.

I went down to the crew bar and the new bartender served everyone but me for the first 20 minutes (I need to grow me some tits, or at the very least, moobs). I finally got my beer 15 minutes before last call. I got back to the table and realized, silly rabbit, the fucker isn’t twist off and I the bartender didn’t open it. Lucky for me I know the open the bottle with the lighter trick. That was about it for me, and even know it was extremely trivial, it was the sign that no matter what I did, the planets were dead set against me today. I very carefully drank my beer, admired the Romanian girls ( am I beginning to narrow down where the hottest girls are from….Romania V. Croatia; only time will decide), and headed back to my cabin. I was greeted by my roommate who was good enough to tell me I have 6 hours of training tomorrow (thanks for the heads up, “supervisor”) and a monthly boat drill at 6am. When it rains it pours.

The saving grace of the day was the well placed words of a few good crewmates (all with their own tales to tell about the hard times that come with living and working on a ship). Each of them reminded me of this…the day was over, I got through it, and another sun will be coming over the sea. I will leave you with that little bit of hope which will hopefully get you through your next trying day.

Until then, keep it on the reel,

Seabag

P.S.

For you of the technical mindset, know that the aforementioned show is one hour long and has 67 movements, no small potatoes! In retrospect, fucking up only one cue in a show that has the average of one plus cues per minute ( these are in some cases 1 ton pieces of scenery) and not killing anyone aint too shabby. Silver lining, bitches!

P.P.S

I’ll have the St. Thomas pictures for you tomorrow, ya jackals.