Back Home!
Last night, after dinner, the sewage system finally overloaded, so I had to take drastic action. During the night, we disabled the toilet facilities in all cabins (except for our first-class suites and officers quarters of course). We slipped a note under every door to the effect that for the last day, in the interests of health and safety, passengers would have to use the toilets in the public areas.
Well, needless to say, that caused a lot of aggravation next morning for my crew. Some of the passengers were even quite hostile, which personally I find inexcusable. It’s hardly the crew’s fault that the sewage system has failed. In my opinion, it’s such a rare event as to be on a par with an unexpected storm, and really no fault of anybody. It doesn’t help the situation of course that there were long waiting lines to get into the public toilets, and that some of the passengers were unwell. I’ve been assured by the ship’s chef that there is no possibility that this was caused by food poisoning, but as a precaution, I’ve ordered that all out-of-date food should be jettisoned.
Anyway, on the bright side, the sewage will not now back up into the lower cabins, which is a feather in my cap.
At mid-morning, I got some news that I thought best to conceal from the passengers until they were about to leave the ship. The US authorities have temporarily banned all planes belong to Gamalia airlines from landing in the US, so our cruise company has had to charter two American planes to take passengers back to Fort Lauderdale.
That has implications for all of us. My company has had to incur an unexpected cost, and because we will have to shuttle the planes using two return trips, half of the passengers will have a very long wait before they can board the planes. In fact they probably won’t be back in Fort Lauderdale before midnight. I did ask if more planes could be chartered, but it seems the costs would be too high. When the time comes to tell the passengers, I’ll make sure they understand that this is all caused by the American authorities, and not by anyone connected with Gamalia. It was later in the day that I heard what had triggered this. An exit door had fallen off a Gamalia plane just prior to take-off. I agree that this sort of thing shouldn’t happen, but nobody was injured, so I do think the Americans over-reacted.
So all in all, it wasn’t the best way to end the cruise. I stayed well away from the passengers all day, until they were leaving the ship, where I thought they’d be pleased to see me bidding them goodbye. For a little while, we were handing out discount vouchers for future cruises, but the sort of language they used was not printable, so we stopped doing this.
It just shows how ungrateful some people can be.
I’m not sure when we next cruise, but it will surely be less traumatic than this one.
