August: The Shipwreck
[PART 6]
How can I describe the difficulties of those days of ship launching? It makes me tired to think of them. Mayflies carried in by the hundreds on an evening breeze, blackouts, blaring alarms, blatant theft and bad attitudes… plus no plans… no training… no delivery on promises made. We had known it wouldn’t be easy. But I guess we failed to anticipate all the ways it would not be easy. We would have been better off calibrating our expectation for something like ‘wild, wild western showdown, on a boat, stuck in the mud, in the dark’.
Attempting hotel administration in a work zone was something of a mean joke. For one thing, we had no computers. A single workstation had been set up. We were given credentials for one user to login, so 5 of us were trying to politely share. (Naturally, most everything that the higher-ups asked us to do was “Urgent! ASAP! VIP!”)
Our intentions were the best, but it was all too simple to become frustrated and impatient with everyone underfoot and elbow. Our friendships lived under standing apologies. (“It’s not personal; it’s NOT YOU!- We are GOOD- love you!!! I just … REALLY need this computer right now.” “...And um Yes, so do I-” “...And so do I-”)
Everyone on the team was a strong, unique character- which I loved! So very early on, I made a good-natured deal with Jay, Freddy, Ian and Astrid*:
“Let’s promise each other we will never take offense at each other’s AMAZING personalities!”
Hearing from a distance, Harlow drew near us with a sigh of relief, pledging,
“I will drink to THAT!”
We had no printers, come-and-go wifi, no phones, and no key access. For some reason I never could understand, IT also couldn’t issue keys to any of us. They had made 2 master keys- to be held by the AGM and the Assistant Chief Housekeeper- and they stopped there.
Since our communication systems weren’t in place, since cell towers barely reached us, and since Nick and Gayle never stayed stationary, accessing rooms became a feat of all-day athleticism. Whoever needed a key would have to run the stairs, race the decks- shouting names down long hallways until the holder of a precious key was located. Then they’d have to run to the door we needed open. Then back to return the key, and finally, carry themselves panting back to their station.
Our company email addresses had been set up incorrectly. If any correspondence was sent to let us know someone was headed our way, it was wasted. Surprise guests (workers, designers, contractors and VIPS) simply walked on, and asked with indignation why we didn’t have rooms ready for them. “….We sent the emails!”
Mornings I sat quietly on the plastic-covered couches in the unfinished lobby, and prayed for the whole place.
Ian liked to call the knit-throw-adorned living space my “dominion”. But I claimed the space every dawn in the name of Jesus. I prayed for health and satisfaction for the crew, and that this rough and ragged place would become, even for us today, a place of pure hospitality, of refreshment and of healing.
The crew, overall dealt with the setbacks heroically. The Christians among us leaned on God- we proclaimed his unalterable goodness. We looked to him for help and spoke his name freely. Until one day, we were instructed not to. In fact, Art instructed the management team to discourage conversations involving God, to “steer people away from the subject”.
The relationships between the hospitality staff (us) and the shipbuilding company workers (them) became more and more strained. As long as the work was still underway, the ship officially belonged to them: we were just renters.
They were the ones who were late! Time was ticking. Guests were coming!
We needed to be onboard- we needed to get our hotel set up. But in every matter of dispute, they could overrule us- and they did, with visible pleasure.
Ship’s artwork and our personal belongings disappeared out from under us. Carefully made rooms, ready for guests were treated with distain. They had all the access, and they abused it. We found contractors sleeping during the day in freshly made beds. Housekeepers found their work undone, again and again with no regard. It was horrifying and demoralizing for all of us.
I started to feel, not like an agent of welcome, but like a guard dog, protecting my innocent young crew. When I checked workers in for their stays, I held their room keys hostage, until they satisfied my inquisition.
“We’ve been through a lot, so I need to know: do you intend to do good work here?
Please, promise me you won’t put on the slippers.”
The deadlines for the work to be finished passed again. But in the bones of the ship, construction still wasn’t up to standard- the paperwork couldn’t be signed. The ship couldn’t be ours. More work was needed and every second would count. We were forced to bring more and more workers onto the ship- accelerating the pace even while the ship was being moved from the canal, to our home port in New Orleans. There was no choice but to let these journeymen sleep in the rooms- even the guest-ready ones.
It was to be an arrangement of dire necessity.
They were meant to sleep in the beds only- they were not to touch the minibars; not to use the fine assemblage of toiletries. Yet they would treat their few days onboard as though it were a personal vacation. As though it was their right, and their reward. They wore the slippers.
Not only that, but they, having no lack of master keys for their own use, took over any room they wanted- without saying a thing to us. We were knocking on individual doors for days, rifling through backpacks and belongings just to figure out which terrible goldilocks had been sleeping in all our baby bears’ beds. It was hard to smile at them, knowing the careless insult and injury they had inflicted on Gayle, Julia, Opal, and all the rest.
We were beating the wind. Without technology, without our spaces properly built, with saws spinning and pipes leaking, with instructions changing and changing and changing, every task seemed to take 8 times the effort it should.
At day’s end, I would congratulate whomever I passed on the stairs with an incredulous high five, saying
“We did it again! We made something out of nothing!”
Corporate and senior leaders from abroad were brought in. American and European influence clashed. Officially, there was no “right way” to build and run the operations here. No one had issued a decision from the top. But every new pair of boots on the ground was certain they knew best- from hour to hour, the full force of someone’s weight was thrown on us to make us conform to their vision. This direction; then that.
Paul, the Bar Manager, would catch my eye whenever we passed each other; he’d say,
“One day closer. We just have to make it through today, and we’ll be one day closer.”
Aloïs, the Exec Chef, with fire in his eyes, whispered to me one evening:
“We can’t let them win.”
Corporate “help” had been eating our housekeeping leaders alive for months: disenfranchising and diminishing them with condescending remarks. Faye, ever the stoic, ran from me when I told her with deep respect that I could see what she had been up against- she didn’t want me to see her cry.
Jay told me he had started looking for other jobs. A few times we closed the office door to open a Bible and pray. It felt strange to feel like we were breaking a law by acknowledging the One giving us breath to this very moment. Without Jesus, we could do nothing.
“Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”
Faith on the crew continued to express itself. Scripture references quietly appeared on the white board in the break room. I didn’t erase them, and no one else did either.
“‘No weapon formed against you shall prosper, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their vindication is from Me,’ declares the LORD.”
I think it was August 18th when Dawn, a beautiful Dutch woman appeared, coming to my aid. She was brilliant, experienced, fair and kind.
Unfortunately, by the time she came to me, I had lost much of the wind in my sails. I was half a breath from giving up; ready to let the decrepit castle crumble around me.
It wasn’t the conditions that had worn me down. More than anything, I had grown weary of taking complaints from Bobby, Jill and Erin- the little team I was responsible to lead. My training had taught me to show them care and respect by listening well. But I never learned to draw the line, and I’m afraid I gave them too much airtime against my sympathetic ear. They rained complaints on me like I was daughter and mommy. On the rare occasions when our big bosses checked in with us, their lips stayed pressed astonishingly tight. They nodded and smiled at Art and Nick like good soldiers. But at me, they rolled their eyes, raised their voices, and sent torrents of opinion by express mail. I came to dread them. I came to love sending them on break, or off-duty. When they were elsewhere, I could breathe.
“They’re not like employees”, my colleague observed quietly to me, “they’re like guests.”
“They’re eating me alive”, I told my bosses, but my bosses didn’t have time to talk.
My team was insatiable for information, and I was diligent to give them the rundown of every fresh update I received. But in this unmade, ungoverned universe, every fact I committed to us turned to nonsense before I could turn once around. It struck me as a wretched blow to be so frequently made a liar.
I felt too defeated even to bring Dawn up to speed, when she was transported suddenly into our midst. But she sat me down, poured me a cup of tea, and told me,
“All of that, is why I am here.”
A few days later, I wrote my friends back home:
“A Dutch woman came to the ship a few days ago to help me. She has been Jesus to me- doing all I cannot do- for me and for my benefit. She pulled me from deep waters.”
Dawn was a one-woman army of reinforcement. She gave me instruction, systems, documents, files, and procedures- everything I had been missing. She challenged my bosses with a curious question. “Corporate and senior leaders have been working to set up every other department on the ship for months. Why, all this time, was no one sent to Emily?”
She was tough. No sugar-coating. Dutch!
A lot of people onboard took offense to her right away. I found her wonderful.
Dawn was visibly disgusted by the way my little team spoke to me. She found them arrogant, unpolished and rude. But she told me, “You are too late. You have let them disrespect you for too long.”
She wanted to understand what had happened. How had the team come to think themselves as my superiors, when I was theirs? I tried to explain how they all had been hired with the expectation of being soon promoted. After our first voyages with guests, one of them should be chosen as relief for my role, so I could take vacation. They had been baited with the expectation of being automatically implanted as top leaders on the second ship, upcoming. They saw themselves as “putting in their time”, though plainly too good for the roles they had accepted. They hated the lack of respect, hated the lack of privileges, hated the pay and hated waiting for what they believed they deserved.
I had asked them a few times if they wanted to be in this stormy season with the crew or not. I was clear- we are not going to have it easy for a long time. There is no clear path ahead of us- it’s going to take a lot of grit, and, as we’d found out, a painful deal of flexibility to get through this first year. If they didn’t really want to be here, it wouldn’t work.
“Oh, we do want to be here!” they would assure me in those moments. But promptly they would resume the reliable barrage: a dozen creative expressions of their malaise.
Since Art and Nick were busy, and did not have time for my requests for assistance, I was at a loss. I kept trying to encourage and stabilize my three in their roaring. I tried to give them the schedules they requested, and the conditions they preferred. But nothing I did seemed to make any difference.
Dawn, though not an effusive person, gave me a compliment that helped me lift my thoroughly beaten brow. She told me,
”These three, it’s very clear that they believe they are better than you. But there is a huge difference between them and you. You are not the same at all. Because the way you speak, the way you approach people… as soon as you say one word, you make everything calm; you feel, everything is ok. So when the guests will come to you with problems, most of their concerns will disappear just from being near you. Your team should learn from you.”
Her challenge was to get me to own my rank: “You are the boss. YOU say so, so it IS so.”
I wonder how it might have been if she had come sooner.
On the day that I quit, I had no idea I was going to quit.
I had not marked the warning signs that my battery had drained so lethally low. That my back was so strained one word could break it. But that is what happened, like a perfect storm.
Jill had slipped and slid down the stairs a day prior. Nick gave her leave for a few days rest- though, strangely, it didn’t occur to him to tell me so. I learned later that I was down a third of the team. Bobby had requested that morning off so he could entertain some family. Erin also was eager to have the day with her mom. I had just worked a terrible, day-turned-overnight shift (having to do with Captain overruling HGM and causing shenanigans untold). Now I had to keep staying awake, covering the day until Bobby returned.
For days I hadn’t been eating properly. With unannounced contractors still embarking at all hours, and someone needing to be physically there to receive them, there just wasn’t time. I had started, routinely, to feel dizzy and faint.
I kept asking for help.
I told IT, I need my team to have access and keys- it can’t be only me that has them. My team must be empowered so that they can be functional, rather than simply decorative.
I had told the hotel managers, I need to have the info that you have. I can’t keep being blindsided in the moment by arrivals or extending guests.
Aside from the grievances of my own direct reports, I was hearing from crew in every arena. That morning, a sweet server in the dining room told me her pants were falling down because of missing meals for days. The corporate managers who had taken over her department were working the servers so hard, and so late that they always missed the windows for crew to eat. Finally when work was done about 10 or 11 pm, they were given only pork to eat, which she couldn’t. No vegetables, no starches. Of all the unbelievable things. It was another glaring instance of the managers from abroad diminishing us for a power trip.
I had approached Cecil, one of our corporates and said gently,
“Cecil, you need to know that all these little things, one after another, might not seem like too much for our crew to bear, but altogether, they have an effect. One day, you might see the tiniest crack just shatter us.”
“If that’s your only problem, you’re ok”, were his exact and only words, before he smiled patronizingly and took his leave.
I told Simon, the latest foreign manager to arrive,
“It’s hard on us, trying to listen well to so many voices, and still being told all day that every choice we make is wrong. It’s a lot of pressure and on the inside it’s building up, and maybe it’s invisible but one day it will be too much.”
“Pressure is not having a job”, he said, as well as “I appreciate that you can trust me to tell me this.” He also left with those words.
Nick, seeing me looking like the grave, asked, “How are you?”
I said “Not good, Nick”, and he said, “Why?”
I said, “You already know everything”, which was true, and with a shrug, Nick left me there at that desk, where I’d stood for maybe 20 hours at that point.
I saw Pierre Jacques (the head of the construction work) cross the lobby, and called out to him, because I needed travel dates for some of his builders. He was a hard man, but he and I had always had an amiable and real enough understanding, even so. But today, he made a show of scoffing at me, turning his head and walking decidedly away. It seemed, in that moment, he wanted to make sure I understood that he was the one in charge, and he didn’t have to help me if it didn’t suit him. I was too tired to chase him anyway.
Marlene, our head of HR stopped by and also asked me, “How are you?”
“We aren’t well, Marlene. ” I told her.
She said, “Oh, I hate to hear that!” and with that, she also walked away.
Bobby was due back on duty, but he texted me that he was still occupied with his family and would not be back for two more hours. I kept watch, feeling faint from hunger, until, at the end of his time, he came back with family and members of his church in tow. One of them actually walked up to me and told me with a huge smile, “You are very lucky!”
I went to the back office, where Nick was, and slumped in my seat, “Nick, I feel like I’m going to walk off this ship today.”
I don’t know what I thought he would say.
I think I thought he would say, hey, listen, you clearly need to sleep, you need to eat. Go now and rest, and we will get through this. We have come so far, and you’re going to want to be here for the good part. Don’t give up now. The team needs you. We want you here with us.
I’ve always been an idealist.
But he sighed, like he was so inconvenienced by my statement, and said, “This might sound harsh but if your heart isn’t in it, I would appreciate for you to let me know as soon as possible so I can get Bobby ready to take your place.”
Those words actually stunned me, and I didn’t say anything. A breath later, he added lamely, “Or, if you do want to stay, let me know what you need from me so we can help you make it work.”
Then he asked me to write down some room numbers of keys he needed made, and told me some new deadlines he needed me to meet, and he left again.
I hadn’t intended to quit at all. Honestly, in a way, I was just venting to my colleague.
But the way he had responded… when he spoke the words about swapping me out for Bobby, with not even one moment’s hesitation… those words were lights out for me. I could see no way of coming back from that exchange. As soon as Nick stood to leave, I stood up to take my decorations off the wall. I gathered my things in my arms, and tossed the fresh list of assignments to Bobby. I told him,
“I’m going to pack now. I hope you get promoted.”
He took a half minute to register my words, and, staring wide-eyed at me, said only, “Can I have a hug?”
But I didn’t have it in me to hug him. I wanted only to remove myself, and every trace of my having been there. With vision clouded by fatigue and shock, I stripped my bed and packed my room on autopilot. Between handfuls of clothes shoved into bursting duffel bags, I messaged Nick, “As discussed, to make the decision as quickly as possible, I will leave today.”
Less than 2 hours later, I was sitting atop a granite hill, surrounded by nothing, except my zipped-up life. I had a perfect view of the ship. She looked so small.
*Every character (save for me) has received one free alias.
Part 7: September: Safe Harbor
Part 5: July: The Shipyard