May 12th Jamaica

May 12, 2011- Jamaica

                I found out late last night that I would have another marathon training session again today.  This time the session would consist of crowd control methods during an evacuation.  The teachers were the same as before and I even recognized some of the students from previous classes.  Luckily the training class didn’t start until noon so it gave me a little time to sleep in but even so we still had a few people that had bloodshot eyes at noon.  I don’t really know why they put all the training classes right after the crew events but maybe it’s another test.  I didn’t really know how long the class was going to be but I had heard that it would be a long one.  The teacher (I think she’s from Italy) said that normally they have two eight hour classes (oh gawd) one for crowd control and the other for emergency procedure leadership (whatever that meant) but the condensed it to one four hour class.  Ug.  There goes my time that I wanted to spend in Jamaica.  She had brought the standard tray of cookies and orange juice (I had learned to conserve the cookies until I really needed them) so I was able to munch on them as the class went by.  The beginning was somewhat interesting.  They showed some videos about what has happened to Carnival in the past (ship fires, industry crashes etc).  Apparently Carnival had a couple of accidents in the 80s that involved ship fires and accidents.  I know one ship recently (in the past few years) had engine trouble and had to be towed back to Miami.  I think the Navy was called in to lend assistance with food and fresh water.  She went over all the different organizations of the maritime business and how they affected each other, blah, blah.  I honestly feel that if we had some emergency and we were far at sea we would be in big trouble.  After all there are over 3500 people onboard this ship speaking over 60 languages and I know that a lot of them have an extreme difficulty understanding English.  If there was a fire or something we would be in big trouble even with all the different countermeasures we have onboard.  The course moved on to how to evacuate a crowd at a muster station and what some common emergency situations you might come up against.  They ranged from missing children, drunken guests, and people trying to steal your life jacket during an emergency.  We even had a little demonstration where a portion of the class were guests trying to get onboard a life boat and some of the students played out the emergency situations while other people in class were crew members trying to solve the situations.  I guess Carnival makes it as entertaining as possible since they know you really don’t want to be there.  Honestly the class was four hours and I don’t really remember a lot from the class (that tells you something right?).  I think the class could have been broken down into a two hour class but I guess they keep it that long because most people don’t speak English very well and it would be too much to try to speed it through by perhaps speaking quicker.  After a while guests were starting to come back to the ship so the bar next door was playing some dance music and it distracted us from everything.  The other bar made me not want to be there even more.  She gave us one break during the entire four hour session so I quickly went to restock up on cookies and orange juice for the other two hour session.  She taught us the basics of the flight or fight response and we watched another movie from the late 1980s on how to observe and study people at a muster station.  The clothing and dialogue of the movie was horrible and definitely dated but I guess it got the point across.  I felt like I was in driving school again unable to escape but at least I had some cookies!  The training concluded with a little clicker quiz game.  She grouped us into five teams and we answered some questions from each module.  After we finished the little game she gave us a test and (surprise!) most of the questions were exactly from the little game that we played no more than ten minutes before.  I guess Carnival really wants you to pass the test the first time so you won’t have to do the four hour training again.  Right before the training ended I felt the bow thrusters engaged.  Well, I guess I’ll get off in two weeks when we’re back there again.  After training I headed to the theater to help load in for our show tonight.  We prepared most of the show yesterday so there wasn’t much to do.  All we had to do was move the band cart and take the balloon basket down.  Pretty much took five minutes.   The show ran well but I was falling asleep halfway through it.  I guess I need to sleep a little bit more.  After the show I turned in at 11.