These Are Not My Co-Workers

(Title is reference to a song, "This Is Not My Beautiful Life." If you know the song I am talking about, and who it is by, please let me know.)

One of the weird things about shipboard workplace is the life and schedule. I work a four-two and a five-five split.

The five-five split is seven am to noon and four pm to nine with variation due to technical emergencies and cruise turn over. (End of cruise/beginning of cruise day, embarkation day, is a very long day of computer processing crap that the main frame should be able to do itself but instead needs a babysitter for.)

The four-two refers to four months on and two months off. Before you are in awe and envy of my two month vacation, do remember I work 120 days in a row, ten hours a day, before having two months off. I am not by any means complaining. Just saying it is well deserved.

All this was to explain how odd our workplace is because the office staff is constantly turning over. Every four months, each person goes on vacation for two months and there position is filled by someone else. Thus, for example, during your four months you will have two different bosses in the same position. When I started Joseph was the Hotel Director, now it is Herbert. This is true for every position.

Anyway, last week, by chance, 25% of the office staff turned over. Imagine coming into work one day and having 25% new staff. They are all returning staff, and know what they are doing, but you still have to adjust to everyone’s different styles.

In some ways it is great, you get rid of people who you don’t work well with. I lost one person I really clashed with…. But I got another one back. I guess there is a law: Conservation of Co-Workers Who Annoy You.

But it is a very strange environment to come into work one day and be working with completely different people, who do not need to be trained, who simply pick up where the predecessor left off. It is a little twilight-zone-ish, to simply wake up one day and have the office staff be different and yet everything else the same.

I find it interesting, so I thought I would share that twilight-zone oddity of my office life, at sea.