One of the busiest and most diversely demanding jobs on this ship is clearly that of the client service officer. To begin with, imagine that guy on the Progressive commercials who has the job of training people not to act like and turn into their parents. Whoever invented that commercial deserves an all-time achievement award for understanding the modern human psyche of aging and general human nature. What that person probably doesn’t even realize is how magnified that “becoming like your parents” tendency becomes once you get aboard a cruise ship. The very first thing you realize about cruising, besides that it’s an older person’s game, is that every single person who boards a cruise ship has a goodly portion of their soul invested in the notion that they “are not really cruise people”. This is the classic Woody Allen (or was it really Groucho Marx?) line that people do not want to be a member of a club that would have them as members. No one on a cruise ship wants to think of themselves as cruise people. That means that every one of the 930 passengers onboard this ship is a closet cruise person and is filled with stupid questions that no self-respecting cruise ship person would ask, much less stupid questions that a non-cruise ship person could possibly conjure. And it’s the job of the client service person to both answer those questions and still make that passenger feel like they are still not a cruise ship person and yet secretly is becoming a devoted advocate for being a cruise ship person.
If that all sounds confusing, you are starting to get the picture. Most of the people onboard have boundless stupid questions, made more prolific and less meaningful by the mere fact that they have more time on their hands than they are generally used to. Even if they came up the gangway as a somewhat hip and modern tuned-in person about town, that all changed as the very ground under their feet gave way to the rolling deck of a moving ship. All of the rules of nature that normally govern the day-to-day lives of the average retiree have been suspended and replaced by a new reality governed by ship-board laws the same way that a ship’s captain can marry people at sea where such a guy might not be trusted otherwise to advise you on what to wear for dinner.
Let me give you an example of this vortex of surreality. What could be more basic to the existence of a traveler than having clean underwear? Packing for a trip is an art and it’s a very personal one that involves a good deal of cognitive ability and both foresight and planning. The last thing you ever want to happen on a trip is to run out of clean underwear. No one packs 18 pairs of underwear for an 18-day cruise. The first issue is whether you prefer to overpack with nine pairs or under pack with six. This seems like simple math, but it is more like calculus since their are an infinite number of limits and possibilities that encroach on the simplicity of the one man for one day underwear equation. The truth is, we all want an underwear cushion in our lives. When we travel normally by plane, we know that we must be rigidly prepared to seize any extended stay in one locale as an opportunity to update our underwear inventory. When we travel by car we can be much more flexible because baggage constraints do not enter the equation. But when you travel on a cruise there is a whole different way one must think, see the world and do math, all rolled into that whole conundrum of not wanting to be considered as a cruise person…or be like your parents. When you board a cruise ship you immediately have to recalibrate your entire laundry program. To begin with, you may be surrounded by people who remind you of your parents (certainly YOU are not that old or that feeble or that lame-brained), but yet you find yourself back in college where you don’t own a washer or dryer and must either pay your roommate to wash your drawers (that’s the same guy who would eat a worm for a dime when you were kids) or find your way into a laundromat state of mind,
Laundromats are the great leveler of humanity. I’m not sure I knew that cruise ships even had laundromats. It’s both logical and illogical at once. These people have paid $15-25k to be pampered in the lap of luxury with a welcome aboard cocktail here and a midnight buffet with limitless sushi there. Surely they want someone else to wash their underwear. But not so fast, Abernathy, remember that these are retirees who may have a stash of dough in the bank, but they are mostly fixed-income sorts in a world of infinite longevity possibilities. These are people who have time on their hands and the lost pride of the once powerful and professional. Given a long cruise and given an onboard laundromat, these cruise/non-cruise people have all sussed out that a laundromat equates to a competitive advantage against the thieving ways of the cruise ship ogres who want to charge you $1.50 to wash your underwear. They ignore the fact that onboard laundering cost are between a half and third the cost of fancy hotel laundry services. They also seem to ignore that 9x$1.50 (assuming you were so bold as to pack one extra pair of underwear only) equals $13.50 versus the cost of one umbrella drink at $11.00. So off to the onboard laundromat they must go as they skip one mahjong game or lecture on the expanding cosmos.
You are only as powerful in a laundromat as the number of quarters in your pocket. But on any upscale cruise ship, where the washers, dryers and even the detergent are free, power resides in presence. Seizing control of a washer or several dryers is both a timing thing and a stand-your-ground thing. If your cycle ends and you are not there, wet laundry removal or semi-dry laundry crumpling is simply a risk of the trade. Polite civility is veneer-thin once you enter the laundromat and your status with a penthouse suite for which you paid a premium means nothing. Your wet underwear go on the floor if you are not there to retrieve them when the finishing bell sounds. This is where the client service officer gets involved. What exactly are the rules of etiquette in the laundromat? And where are the laundry police when you need them?
Today we are going from Punta Arenas to Ushuaia. Look at a map. That’s one of those “you can’t get there from here” problems for a cruise ship…and yet we must. Chris and I had a big debate about how we would go in these tricky waters (but then neither of us are really cruise people…or are we?) Certainly our parents wouldn’t need help understanding a ship’s optimal route, or would they? Naturally, since Chris wanted to get this right, just as Ann wanted dominance in the Deck 6 laundromat (peer pressure was inducing her to launder her own duds), Chris went surreptitiously to the client service officer for the answer. Meanwhile, the “nice” lady in cabin 6012 was telling the client service officer that Ann was hogging the washers and could the laundry police please set her straight here in the Strait? By the way, Ann may or may not be a cruise person, but what 1602 and the laundry police did not understand is that you don’t want to fuck with her and her underwear.
Chris was told we would steam out the eastern Strait of Magellan and reenter the Beagle Channel from the East to get to Ushuaia. Turns out we went south to catch the Beagle Channel from the west. So much for the client service officer’s knowledge base. Meanwhile, Ann had emptied two of her three washers and sat quietly and angelically smiling at the laundry police when they arrived. So much for the client service officer’s power of intervention. The Beagle Bungle and the Deck 6 Laundry Caper have two thing in common…they prove the burdens of client service on a cruise ship and the validate that none of this could ever happen to cruise people…or to our parents.