Crossing the North Sea

Captain’s Log, October 19th: This is our first sea day of the cruise. An opportunity for passengers to relax and enjoy the on-board facilities, ahead of the first shore visit. Sadly we’ve had some passenger complaints already. It just shows that whatever you do for these people, some of them are never satisfied.
The biggest problem today was regarding the cinema. We had two well-known blockbuster movies to show them: ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Duck Soup’. What could be better than a drama and a Marx brothers comedy? Not only did some criticize our choice of movies, many took exception to the projection facilities. This was totally unreasonable. These movies were originally filmed to fit old-fashioned movie-theater screens, so our projectionist helpfully stretched them out to widescreen. It just shows you can’t please everyone.
This evening there were issues with the dining facilities. Unfortunately not enough passengers were willing to pay the modest extra charge for premium dining, so that the regular dining rooms were overloaded. Many passengers had to wait for an hour or so before they were seated. Hopefully some of these will see sense and choose premium dining in future. To encourage this, we’ve cut the extra charge down to $30 per person, but some of the old people on this cruise are so mean, they’re even grumbling about that.
It’s not a great start for the cruise, but hopefully tomorrow’s shore stop at Copenhagen will lighten the mood, and cut back on the unwarranted grumbling.