Today was pretty easy when it came to crew duties. I went to bed last night around 11. My cabin mate Daniel was working in the back lounge so I was able to pass out fairly quickly. The cabin is realitively small. There is a bunk bed and a tiny little chest of drawers which consist of three drawers and a place to hang up nice clothes a little night stand. Someone was kind enough to leave a little LCD tv gaff taped down to the stand so we can watch movies. All I need now is a VGA cable. And in the corner a tiny bathroom complete with shower and medicine cabinet that is basically spring loaded for the mirrors to hit you in the face when you open them and a little desk in the corner with a midget fridge that is incapable of keeping things cold. I may try to experiment with the mini fridge and a 12 pack of coke when I get back to port. The bunk beds come complete with little curtains on the bed so in ship fashion you can close them if/when you want to go to sleep. They’re pretty nice. They block out most of the light of the fluorescents when closed. I was kind of shocked when I first woke up to see the lights on but the bed dark because of the curtains. The room is located on the same deck of the theater so all I have to do is walk across the hallway as my “morning commute.” My call was 9:30 for Laser tag so I just woke up an hour early to get things situated and stuff. I discovered that was WAAY to early and I was left with just cruising the ship for about 45 minutes. The Laser Tag event is pretty much a large plastic blow up thingy (similar to a blow up jumping arena for kids) and they would run around and shoot each other with laser guns like at Dave and Busters. We only had one group show up and the game was five minutes long so you can imagine how long this event lasted. It took more time to set up and put away than it did for the kids to play in it. We arrived in Grand Turk around 11 so I pretended to play tourist and go up to the Lido and Panorama deck (9 and 10) to take some pictures. Hopefully I can figure out how to get them online the next time I’m in port. It is a pretty island the whole white beach thing but other than the beach there wasn’t much there not to mention the island looked pretty small. I think the island is still a British territory because it has the British flag in their flag, but I could be wrong. I couldn’t leave the ship because they wanted me back at 1 to do what they call a Lock Out and Tag Out. So I took my pictures and went back downstairs to grab some lunch in the crew mess. Lunch was ok, honestly I couldn’t remember what I had to eat. Around 1 I went back to the theatre and Jayson was there to raise a part of the stage. Part of the stage has hydraulic lift to turn a portion of the stage into platforms roughly 3’ wide-- basically steps. Our job was to get underneath the steps and vacuum out all the dust that was underneath them. I was lucky. I only had to vacuum out the cyberlights and lights that were being used for sidelight on the most downstage of SL and SR. The lights were really dusty. I probably could have finished faster if they gave me a damp rag as opposed to a vacuum. Apparently they only dust them once every two weeks and oh boy, you can tell. The dust was definitely caked on there. After I completed that Daina was still working underneath the giant platforms so she told me I could leave just to be back around 5 o’clock for “load in” of the Liberty’s main show: “Worlds.” I went to my cabin and took a little nap (I don’t really know why I was so tired) and around 4 I went down to the MSA’s (don’t ask me what it stands for) office to get my contract and ID. They took my picture and I signed all the necessary forms (the contract was one of the longest ones I’ve signed) but I took about 20 minutes to read everything over (I learned this from my time spent in Utah). After everything was taken care of I went back to the theater to set up for the show. I expected to move some lights around, change out some stuff, move drops and pretty much do some serious heavy lifting to load in the show. Boy was I wrong. All we did get the chain motor and move some things around in the air and get some of the props set. It took four people 20 minutes to do it. After the complicated load in David showed me how to load the pyro and confetti cannons for the show. Ironically enough the pyro was kept in a “fireproof” locker on the 7th deck (basically a lockbox next to passenger cabins). I grabbed two sandwich looking bags, one for each show tonight and we put them in an ammo box and took them downstairs. The pyro was pretty easy to load. There were sparklers, crackles, and little bangers (that’s not the official name). The sparklers tied into the floor in grates around the monitor speakers. The connections are bare wire connections so it’s just tension between the two pieces of plastic that hold them in. I loaded four of those and moved on to the crackles. These produce a firecracker like effect except with a lot less noise during the show. They are attached around head height of the first boom SL and SR and the connections are the same type as the sparklers. What I call the little bangers were next. These were attached to the “ABBA drop” so we had to bring in the drop from the automated system. Once David showed me how to bring in the drop (via computer and automated lift versus a typical counterweight system) we attached them to their connections. This time these were pretty much telephone cord type of connects and there were three of them per connection and three connections. The leads leading from the connection to the actual explosive were pretty long, roughly a foot, which hung down below the drop (they were suppose to do that). After we installed the pyro we moved on to the confetti cannons. There were six per show. Loading them was pretty easy all I had to do was pump a foam cylinder into the tube; dumps rolled up confetti into the tube then tape the cap on with masking tape. Installing the canisters was a little bit complicated though. Since there were six of them around the balcony there were tops to the lids in which I opened up to install the canisters. The position was very similar to the balcony rail at the Alliance and let me just say Thank God that I’m skinny to fit in there. I first had to jump the 3’ tall glass wall that overhung the balcony and open up the lid. Luckily there was a piece of horizontal pipe for me to stand to keep me stable since the ship was a bit rocky today. It is a really different feeling to be moving left and right while trying to balance on a rail on the balcony. Next, I screwed in the little CO2 canisters that propelled the blast. They almost looked like CO2 canisters for paintball guns and small things like that. Then I attached the cylindrical canister and safety tied the canister around the rail (so the canister can’t be launched with the confetti streamers). After the pyro and streamers were loaded I headed back up to the booth so David could show me how to turn everything for the show. I’ll spare you the details but it was pretty complicated because of the many different consoles, lasers, pyro machines, and stuff to get them sequenced with time code. Time code is a wonderful thing. It is really, REALLY weird watching a show because I didn’t have to push any of the buttons or call any of the cues. It almost takes the electrician and stage manager out of the picture completely. We did have two spot operators. Apparently they work in the engine room and earn extra money working on the show. They were pretty bad. I had a tough time not to tell them to tip up or get in the right color frame, or whatever. The only thing for me to do during the hour long show was to watch for errors and when the time was coming for pyro to arm the pyro device (a safety mechanism that will not allow it to fire) and to hold down the dummy switch (also safety for the pyro). The show ran pretty smoothly I only noticed a page full of notes in my little green notebook that I’ve been carrying around everywhere. Apparently that wasn’t a lot of notes compared to certain things that David has seen. We couldn’t run a portion of the show tonight because the ship was too rocky for the dancers. Pssh, the dancers are spoiled anyways, I say. We had one show at 7:30 and after that was completed around 8:30 we reset and got ready for another show at 9:30. Resetting the show consisted of reloading the pyro and reloading the confetti canisters. That took about 15 minutes. It’s tiring to run a show at 7:30 because sunset is around 6:00 so it feels really late, especially running the later show at 9:30. After we ran both shows I was told our call wasn’t until 11:30 the next morning for a rehearsal of “Carnival Legends” whatever that was. So after the show we all decided to go down to the crew bar for a drink. I heard drinks at the crew bar were cheap but I didn’t really know because Daniel bought me my first drink, a rum and coke (of course). Apparently the bar has a beer selection from all over the world and I might have to start experimenting with my beers. The music was pretty great as well, all typical top 40 hits including Gaga, Beyonce, and Britney. I was shocked to see how “gay” the music selection was, but it didn’t bother me much. I just tried to keep from singing. We sat for a while and talked about work mostly (a good safe topic) we got into discussions about the different ships and what was different on each ones. Apparently the Liberty is one of the nicer and newer ships and we get the top shows as well. Kinda shocking to hear because I thought the show tonight was just so-so (tits and glitz, but hey, that’s cruise work). I saw that Daniel’s drink was empty so I offered to return the favor of buying him a drink. I walked up to the double bar and ordered a Corona and a rum and coke. I was shocked when the total came back: a grand total of $2.50. Holy crap! Stunned, I walked back to the discussion about ship life. The drink was mixed pretty well, a good 50-50 mixture. Love it! That was the grand total I spent the entire night. Daniel bought me one, I bought one, and David bought one. David had about 4 Guinness and Daniel had 3 Coronas and Diana had 4 Strong bows. I was going to buy some water and possibly another drink but by that time it was 1:45 and they stop serving at 1:30 so Daniel told me. Honestly, I wasn’t drunk but I had a pretty good buzz when we walked back upstairs. Cyndi was right, having a few drinks does help with the motion of the ship but I didn’t want to get too drunk the first time at the bar. Daniel and I walked back talking about ship life and how Carnival makes most of its money and about the sneaky ways they get around some of the labor laws (long story). Since we didn’t have to get up too early I went ahead and took a shower and went to bed. I got to sleep somewhere around 2:30 am.
No comments:
Post a Comment