It was probably a good idea that I didn’t drink that night. I got a call from the satellite phone around 7am. I almost had a heart attack because it rang so loud right next to my pillow (note to self: do not place phone by the bed). Apparently they were trying to disembark but couldn’t find a microphone to use for the disembarking process. Oh boy, it was going to be a long day. I jumped from the top bunk and stumbled around the room trying to be as quiet as I could to try to put on my uniform. Second lesson, you might as well sleep in your clothes because when they need something they needed it like five minutes ago. We were already moored in Miami and people were already starting to leave the ship. I searched and searched backstage for this bloody microphone but couldn’t find the one that they needed to use for the process. So they just used the wireless microphone instead. Ugh. If it was that easy, why bother calling me at all? I noticed that they had cnn on the side projectors of the stage but there wasn’t any audio. I talked to one of the hosts about it and they said that having audio was optional and it wasn’t a big concern, so after fixing the mic “problem” I returned back to my cabin to get some more sleep. About thirty minutes later, I hadn’t even made it to the almost sleep phase (that’s a technical term for all you people out there) the phone rang again. Oh boy, it’s going to be a looong week. This time it was the cruise director, Jen. Apparently the audio for CNN was being very crackly and she wanted to know if I could fix it. I just sat there for a second. “But there isn’t any audio at the moment in the lounge.” I replied. “Oh, yes there is” she said in her beautiful English accent. I sighed and told her that I would fix it and went back to the lounge grumbling. I listened to the announcer for a while. The mic was crackling! Not the audio! Ah ha! Realizing the problem I simply gave the announcer another wireless mic. This time I didn’t head back to my cabin fearing that they would call again for some other reason. I headed to my favorite part of the ship (NOT the crew bar!! Sillies!) I grabbed my computer and phone and headed for the fourth deck bow. Miami was kinda cloudy and very humid. I spent about an hour catching up on my internet, checking facebook, reading the news, etc when the phone rang again. Jeez! It was security. Apparently there was a pyro delivery and I would need to come down to the gangway to pick it up. Only entertainment technicians are allowed to handle pyro from when it reaches the dock until it fires in a show. There’s only one problem. I took the test a couple of days ago but I didn’t have my pyro certification card yet so I didn’t know if I was allowed to pick it up. I called Jayson, my boss, to be sure. He sounded kinda groggy so I knew I woke him up. Come to think of it I knew it was ten o’clock so I wasn’t sorry I had woke him. If I was up he could be too! I told him about the delivery and he said just to go down to the gangway to pick it up anyways and if I had problems just to call him. So I took my ID and went down to 0 deck security to pick it up. Apparently security hadn’t received it but it was still with the customs agents on shore. Ooookkkkaaayy… where would that be?? Apparently it was at a desk near the entrance. How specific. So I headed to the only office I knew of which was the crew entrance. Walking on the shore during a load is like trying to walk down I-95 going the opposite direction of traffic. There are cranes washing the ship (yes, washing) and a whole forklift three ring circus loading various cargos, equipment, and food and the bridges moving loading new passengers. I kept my head moving, looking in all directions with each step. After what seemed like forever I arrived at the crew customs entrance. I talked with the officer saying that I needed a pyro delivery. He looked at me like I had three heads. “A piiro whaaat??” ugh. “Pyro delivery, you know pyrotechnics??” I replied. He almost grabbed his radio. Uh-oh. “Ooookkaaayy…” he replied. That’s going to be at the perishables office. Of course, at the complete other end of the pier. Ugh. I walked back through the circus of the forklifts and the baggage handlers to the other side of the pier. See, this is how Carnival fails in its training. The answer is just to stumble around and ask random people and they will tell you what to do. Not finding the “perishables office” I asked one of the baggage handlers. He stared at me blankly and just told me to keep going. SIGH. I did as he told. I ran into another one of the obese security agents sitting in a doorway in a chair. I asked him where to go. He made an effort that looked like he was moving mountains just to get out of the chair. He waddled over to an open roll down door and in a small corner was the office. Good God, I would have never found this place. There were palates of random stuff to be boarded on the ship, there were at least four palates of different kinds of beers. I walked into the office and talked to the man behind the desk. He told me that the pyro was here and that I needed to sign for it and it would have to be checked by a k-9 unit. I thought to myself: why would it need to be searched by a k-9 unit. Aren’t k-9 units designed to look for this type of material? Wouldn’t it just be a false positive because we KNEW there were explosives in it? Whatever. At this point… whatever. At this moment the k-9 unit was busy searching the various palates of beer and random boxes. I waited for about 10 minutes for the officer to come over and attempt to open the box with a key. I let him struggle with it for about 4 minutes then offered him my knife (he wasn’t surprised that I had a leatherman). He opened the box and rustled through it for about 10 seconds and then handed off the box to me. I signed for it and took it straight back to the ship. It was a heavy box weighing about 40 pounds. It felt like forever since I saw the silver crew gangway. I walked up the plank and handed the box directly to a security agent whether he wanted it or not. I shoved the ID through the card reader beepy-thingy and skipped any and all forms of the line and walked right through the metal detector, box, steel toed boots and all. The security agent kinda made a face then realized who I was since I asked the questions before I got off ship. I headed directly to the forward elevator. Waiting for an elevator on Miami days is like waiting for it to snow in the desert. I waited patiently and headed for the 7th deck. The pyro locker on this ship is somewhat crazy to think about. Yes, having about 40 pounds of pyro on a ship is somewhat scary to think about but the place they store it is even more so. The pyro locker for this ship is right in the middle of passengers cabins between the exit to the forward outside deck. It’s a tiny little closet more like a broom closet and you would have never known it was there unless you saw me or someone else go and get it. I guess that’s by design, but sleeping right next to 10Kg of pyro for seven days is scary to think about. I cut open the box (the k-9 unit put a special sticker on it) and counted out the bags and put it inside the locker. I was about half finished when the phone rang again. This time it was Jayson. There was a meeting with some big-wig charter company for a ship inspection that he wanted me to be at. They told me when I signed on that I was lucky to get a ship of this class but I didn’t really pay attention to that. Now I know what they were talking about. Apparently in some week in June (or maybe it was July, I can’t really remember) the entire ship would be rented out for some rich dude’s party. I just gazed at him. Good God! I can just imagine how much it would cost to rent a ship of this size and not to mention paying the crew. And that’s not even the fact that they want to bring in a whole bunch of equipment for the productions. We talked about the shows that were going to be produced there. There would be two shows, a gospel chorus thingy and something more R&B style. He mentioned some name that I never heard of and kept going with the briefing. He started talking about all the lights and the design for a minute before I realized that they would not be bringing a lighting designer on ship for the contract. Oh boy… he kept talking but all I heard was blah, blah, blah when I realized that I would be doing all of the design. Crap. Two shows with over twenty moving lights on a console that I haven’t worked extensively with in less than two days. Double crap. I would have less than six hours of active programming time (assuming nothing else was going on in the meantime) to program the show. Triple crap. AND! (yes, there’s an and) the theater would be used as a staging area for all of the road cases that they were bringing onboard. That would drastically reduce my programming time. I started asking questions about the type of equipment they were bringing. Was any if it lighting? No. Good. Most of the stuff was for audio and music. They want to turn every lounge into a DJ space with music going all the time. This is going to be the week from HELL! I turned to him as he was bantering about the space. “Who was the director for these shows again?” “uhh… Patti Labelle” he said without missing a beat. “I think she was in.. uh… Burlesque… or something.” Oh great. Two shows in less than two days on a console which I haven’t worked extensively before and with a diva as a director. This is fantastic. I just sat there for a minute and tried not to cry. We went through all of the different lounges, many of which I have never been in at this point and he kept through his briefing stopping randomly to take pictures. He joked saying the only hard things we had to do were to load in the first day and load out on the last day. Everything in between would be easy. “I’ll buy drinks the rest of the seven days” he said with a laugh. I turned to him rather frankly and said “Don’t kid on that kind of stuff, because I WILL take you up on it” feigning a laugh. He chuckled and we continued on with the briefing. It seems that he will be bringing a lot of equipment onboard. After a while he decided that he had seen enough and departed the ship around 2 so at that point the mess hall was closed and I had nowhere to go for food. Of course, Lido deck would have food but Daniel told me that eating on Lido was a no no for today because all of the guests were coming onboard. So I decided to make the best of it by finishing unloading all the confetti supplies that we got today as well. David told me his other goal for the week was to completely relamp all the moving fixtures in the entire rig before next week. We got a great big box full of VL and spotlight lamps. Apparently David just ordered one of everything when it came to the disposables. I guess I can kinda understand replacing all the lamps just to make sure everything is the same brightness but that is a WHOLE lot of money just to make the cues look brighter. There are still some other issues as well. At this point I had finally made it to dinner so I ran downstairs around ten till six hoping that the mess would be open a little earlier. Thank God it was. I was starving! I think I had three platefuls of food. Laser Tag was after dinner. I hate laser tag. We didn’t have laser tag last week because they needed to work on the turntable and I enjoyed every minute of it. Apparently I’m not the only one who hates it as well. The cruise director hates it, the hotel director hates it, and of course the techs hate it. We rolled out the giant red and blue burrito that was the laser tag arena and set up as usual. I was the person at the door so I let all the little kiddies in and out of the arena. I felt like a circus worker unzipping and zipping the entrance to the inflatable arena. Of course every single kid (and some older ones too) would trip either on their way in or out of the bloody thing so I played kid catcher. I was pretty good at it by the end of the 30 minute game time. Each round was 5 minutes long. 5 minutes for 5 bucks per kid. Carnival makes some money on that nonsense. Finally it was time to roll it back into a burrito. After we deflated it and rolled it back up we had to stuff it into a giant rolling hamper. That was the hardest part because, naturally, it was just a tiny bit too big. After we finished that nonsense we “loaded in” the welcome aboard show. I still can’t get over the fact that load in takes about five minutes depending on the show. I guess when you do something at least twice a week for over six months you get pretty good at it. The show ran fine, I managed to turn everything on correctly without being instructed so I felt proud of myself (baby steps!) After the end of the show I headed up into the guest areas to go to the piano bar. Apparently Kevin was playing a late show and he wanted me to see it. Not having anything better to do I decided to go up. The piano bar is exactly that. The room is modeled in a giant piano (I think it might even be piano shaped) with giant keys on the wall twisting and turning all the way around the room. The bar itself was modeled after a keyboard you sit on bar stools that were designed to look like black keys and the bar was in a circle that encompassed (you guessed it) a piano. Carnival is very literal. I walked in around 12:30 but he was packing up for the night. Apparently he didn’t do the show tonight because it was the first night of the cruise and he didn’t want to scare people away from the bar this early. So we headed down to the crew bar to hang out for a while. I needed to figure out my call time for tomorrow and apparently someone told me that I needed to go ashore but I wondered how I could do that because I was the tech on duty and am suppose to stay with the ship. I met up with Dave and he told me one of the responsibilities of the tech on duty is to go onto Half Moon Cove (Carnival’s private island) and help set up the DJs and bands before the guests got there and also assist packing up at the end of the day. The first tender for the island left at 8 am. Ugh. It was about 2:30. Dianna said that she would go with me and assist since it was my first time so I was thankful for that. After I got all the information that I needed I excused myself and headed to bed. On my way upstairs I noticed the ship was a little bit rocky. I wonder if we were heading into a storm. I decided to go to the bow and take a quick detour. It really is a wonderful place. You can see every star in the sky and watch the ship practically cut through the waves. Yup, we were heading right into a storm. About every three or so seconds a flash of lighting was visible and way off in the distance you could see another cruise ship all lit up with the party lights. You know, it would be really cool to take pictures of this. Forgetting the time I went back to my cabin and grabbed my SLR to take some photos. I got some pretty good ones (I’ll post them to FB) but had to do some various adjusting with the camera. Hearing the shutter click a Pilipino guy came up to me and asked if I was trying to take some photos of the storm. I said yes, and he motioned for my camera. Ummm… yeah. After what felt like forever thinking if I should hand my camera over to a stranger I decided to do it anyways. He put the strap around his neck (a good safety sign) and began flicking all the different buttons on the camera. About two minutes later he handed the camera back to me saying “I think this will work better” and walked away. I took a couple of shots and they were pretty darn good! I had to adjust a few minor things to make them even better but it was a pretty good start. I figured that he was one of the many photographers onboard and really knew what he was doing. I took a couple of shots and headed straight to bed. It was 3:45.
No comments:
Post a Comment