Happy New Year!

So Christmas has come and gone with hardly any notice. I worked from 5:30 am until midnight, and if that is not bad enough, Captain Chutney made us wear Christmas hats. Yes, a farking woolly hat is ideal for that hot Caribbean weather... I also had no credit on my rubbish Antiguan number to receive calls, and the most I did for myself was put in new contact lenses. Holly was particularly Grinch-esque, which admittedly put me in a better mood. I walked past her and told her to turn her frown upside down, 'it's Christmas!', I said. When I got to the bottom of the steps I heard her mumble to herself, 'So?'. 

Later on I also commented on how hot it was in the guest cabins, ‘It’s almost as hot as the galley!’

‘Oh, well is it as greasy and as dirty?’

‘No’.

‘Well then, I win’.

Captain Chutney also put up a huge blow-up ‘mannequin’ on the back of the boat for the occasion. It was of Santa wearing sunglasses and a bathing suit, lying on a hammock between two palm trees. It had a little motor attached that filled it with constant air, and was tacky as hell. It took him all day to realise that I was calling it the self-fallating Santa, and not self-inflating Santa. Eventually someone had to explain it, ‘That means that it blows itself’. So you can see why I would rather drink battery acid than work and entire season with him. What a dick.

2011 was a difficult year and I will be glad to see the arse-end of it. It started off well enough with a three month trip to see my family, lazing on the beach, enjoying the 9:1 exchange rate and generally taking it very, very easy. My ex-boyfriend decided to fly out to come get me in a last attempt to make things work. Trying to rekindle things was tumultuous to say the least, but one particular night we had seemed to work things out. We were with a bunch of friends changing bars at about three am, some walking, one on a longboard and me riding on his handlebars, like we did every day on the way to work. I remember being so happy and laughing, looking around at all my friends and thinking that everything was perfect. Things came to a literally grinding halt when I fell off off the handlebars of the bicycle and broke my front teeth.

Shortly afterwards my beloved grandmother died, which sent me into a deep funk. I decided that the best thing to do to keep me busy (and earn back the money I spent on the most expensive dental surgeon on the island) was to find a job. What finding a job on a boat entails is putting on some khakis and a polo shirt and walking the docks asking for work. I call this the Khaki Prostitution. Fortunately, after only one afternoon, I landed what I thought was the perfect gig. Now I know that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. That lasted a tender three months and my only regret is that I waited so long for the perfect moment to retort, 'Fuck you, I quit!, that he got there first. He was the most bitter and callous person I’ve ever met, and long story short, I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire.

Within a few days I had a new job that my best friend, also a chef, wrangled quite slyly, outing the then similarly nasty chief stew whilst she was on holiday. It was all very carefully manipulated and still makes me want to high five myself at the thought of it. Life was once again perfect until the shit hit the fan the civil police chained that puppy to the dock. Entire crew exodus. Whilst we were still ripping it up all summer long, this sparked a three month beach-days-and-party-nights rampage which ended up with all the girlfriends deciding, drunk in a bar, to move to Miami. Within a week we were all set to go our separate ways for six weeks, and meet in Fort Lauderdale. In those six weeks, we all split, all fell in love, all got our hearts broken, and all returned to Mallorca. Fail. Then, somewhere along the line, I returned the favour to my friend, got her a gig on my current boat, and by January we will all find ourselves in the Caribbean, together again.

And now it is New Years Eve and I have just finished working. I am so tired that I grabbed my pump-like face moisturiser thinking it was my deoderant and sprayed it into my armpit. So with all that in the past, here’s to a new, successful year to come and just the best 2012! Happy New Years, you buggers!

Light Fight

This morning I woke up when it was still dark and went to the bow of the boat with a coffee to enjoy the beautiful morning's peace and quiet before anyone got up. I returned a Zen princess only to find my makeup brushes and pencils sprayed with shaving foam from Gale's attempt to shave the pubic hairs off his primate face. It's one thing to have such bad aim, which really makes me fret about the hygiene of the toilet seat, but to not even clean it up! I was determined not to let anything ruin my day, so I carried on with my morning, which was made even better when I got a cheeky 30 minute break. Just as I got comfortable on my bunk, however, Gale entered, about to enjoy one of his many sporadic siestas of the day. He yawned and sighed obnoxiously so as to alert me to the fact that it was his time for a cat nap, and I was clearly intruding. Being the supremely considerate person that I am, coupled with not wanting to hear him huffing and fucking puffing like a choo-choo on an uphill, I decided to leave the cabin. Just exiting, I asked him if he'd like me to turn off the light at the same moment as I flipped it off. 'Uh, YE-ES!' he responded like a pubescent teenager in need of an attitude adjustment. I stopped without turning around, flipped it back on and walked out.

I went to a good private school, have one and a half degrees, and speak several languages (including talking dirty, and talking shit), so I am wondering how I got to the point where I challenge myself by seeing if I can clench my butt cheeks for as long as it takes me to iron a shirt, and I live with a gorilla whom I fear one day might actually start flinging his number two's in my direction. That and I work double the legal work to rest ratio when I am essentially a lazy bugger by nature. What the fuck, right?

Add to that the bizarre things yacht crew are made to do, like a story I read about an owner who had squares or rare grass flown out to his yacht as his pooch would only shit on the finest Gulf Green money could buy. Or the lady who wanted fresh mango juice every morning, made from mangos that had never been touched by human hands. That is basically what I do. As a Chief Stewardess my job is to get whoever whatever they want. If a guest wants two bunches of light green seedless grapes flown out to the middle of the ocean, and is prepared to pay for it, then I'm the one to hook a brother up. I would love to tell you about the time I had a guest slip down an entire flight of stairs after being all lubed up with essential oils after a massage, or the time we had to disguise wine in apple juice bottles for a pisshead who didn’t want her sugar daddy to know and who was later falling off her chair, or best yet, the man who told his mother that the prostitute onboard was his business partner’s daughter, and the beloved matriarch took it upon herself to spoil her like her very own kin, but can’t. Unfortunately, I am signed up to my eyeballs in confidentiality agreements, like most ‘yachties’ who work for those who have more money than brains. So none of that ever happened.

Out with the old, in with the new!

So that is my crew. Thank god for the amusing few or my life would be subjected to listening to them say ponsy things to one another over the radio like, ‘Bill, there is a maintenance concern that requires your attention in the main saloon...’. Why can’t you just say that you can’t get the fucking Christmas lights to work for godsakes? My radio speak however, consists of a mix between pirate English, ‘yar me matey’, and anything with a Caribbean accent, ‘ai boi, move yo’ bomboclat!’.

‘Isabelle, the radio is a serious means of communication’.

‘Aye aye Captain!’.

‘Isabelle...’.

‘Yar sir?’

‘The radio...’

‘Yis Baaas!’

Now I really like to piss him off by not answering at all, and then saying sweetly, 'Oh, did you radio?' when he eventurally finds me somewhere on the boat. I believe this is called Schadenfreude, and I delight in it.

Of course we could all get along like one big, happy, inbred family, but my lack of interest extends from knowing that in two weeks there will be a crew change. Captain Chutney and his girlfriend, Bucktooth Bill, will be moving back to the Australian Outback to live happily ever after in a desert shanty hut where they will never get dental work done and have fiery haired babies that will blend in with the surroundings of Ayers Rock, I assume.

Eddie will move to a new boat where I he will continue to be a sex pest.

Holly, who is fast becoming my favorite person, just isn't tickled pink by working 18 hours a day, the lazy bitch, or sharing a cabin with two filthy neanderthals who relish the smell of their own farts and who use her shower towel to wipe the stubble out of the sink. Hey, at least they're wiping it.

Bella Bug Killa

I also like the chef on the boat. Like most chefs, she can be pissy and temperamental. It took us a while to come to understand one another, and now that we do, I tend to enjoy her company. Holly is American, quick witted, and generally jovial when the pressure is off. She manages not only to feign interest in what some of the less interesting crew have to say, but to actually be amused by it, which is foreign to me. I know this because I have heard her laughter sometimes and when I come to see where it is coming from, I find only her and Gale in the room. That can mean only two things. She has laughing Tourette Syndrome, or she actually finds him funny. To this I look at him, then to her, give her my hate-face and exit. 

I force her to make me special high-protein meals, and in return she bullies me into making her coffee at the most inopportune moments. She tells me that I look ugly when I think and I call her the life-grinch. Come to think of it, I really like her. She will tell just when to piss off, and I admire that.

Last night we were wired from the exhaustion or working 18 hour days and were in a rather hysterical mood. This was occasionally interrupted by her losing her shit over the Caribbean flies in her galley. She stabbed her knife into a board, stormed out and a few moments later came back with an electric tennis racket fly swatter and said, ‘right bitch, get to work’. What ensued was a hilarious fiasco of the two of us ducking and diving, screaming and laughing, and whacking shit all over the place. We ended up almost in tears from laughter, until I looked at the swatter and realised that it had no more flies stuck to it... At the thought of serving food lightly seasoned with hairy green flies we laughed even harder.

So whilst I share my cabin with Gale the Lip Licker, Holly shares with Eddie the Perv and Mario, the first mate. Mario is nice too. He is tall and lean, also smart, and was born above the local beach bar in Saint Johns, Antigua. He makes a mean rum punch, is besotted with his girlfriend, and mostly just does his job and gets on with it.

Between the two of them however, Holly is constantly being locked out of her cabin whilst they take what I can only imagine are wank breaks, and can never poo in peace without one of them either in the room or knocking on the bathroom door. I wish I had a buck for every death threat I heard her make. Whenever I am just about to point out the wet front of my uniform, or how I exited to find Gale being a dick about the light/bathroom/everything, she’ll point a knife in my direction and say, ‘don’t even go there’. Now I get her to cook things for me in exchange for poo breaks in my bathroom.

Eddie the Pooh.

My favourite person onboard is Eddie. Not only because he is British, but also because he is fun, finds me funny, and is okay to look at. He is what we like to call a chamois pilot, or otherwise a deckhand. He is young, short, well built and well tanned and has large front teeth that he talks around. He calls me poppet and always tells me when he goes to the toilet, and sometimes will even comment on what a ‘relaxing shit’ he just had upon return. He also likes to rub his bum on me when he walks past and say, ‘make way for fanny!’, which I like.

Besides being a chamois pilot, he is also, as you can tell, a bit of a space invader. Every now and then he will saunter up, put on a sleazy, raspy voice and say something like, ‘O’right darlin’, gis a kiss ey’, to which I shout ‘sexual harassment!’ loud enough to make the other people within earshot feel uncomfortable.

Yesterday, upon exiting the rainforest of a bathroom that I share with the gorilla in the mist, Eddie commented that I had a large wet patch on the front of my skort. By now being accustomed to the involuntary soaking I get just on entering my bathroom, I told him blankly that I was so excited for Christmas that I had wet myself. He alternated glances between my face and my skort for a few moments without saying anything, and then announced, ‘Right, well I’m going to go take a shit’.

Gorilla in the Mist.

My very first ten minutes arriving at my new boat I walked in on my cabin mate showering. I was greatly disturbed that not only was this person not a girl, but a plump, middle-aged and balding man with a very pronounced upper lip. I shielded my eyes violently as if hot embers had leapt out of a fire towards my face, but it was too late, and now nothing will ever change that I have seen that man naked. I could cry myself to sleep at night over the fact that the last time I shared a cabin with an engineer he was an extremely sexy bugger with tattoos and a rock climber’s physique, who would slip me one on my lunch breaks, and just about any other time we got a chance.

As an aside, engineers on yachts are generally pale from spending too much time in the machanical bowels of the boat, odd from the lack of social interaction, and very particular about everything. And this man, let’s call him Gale, is no exception.

Gale doesn’t like to make eye contact when he talks and I always have to ask him to repeat himself as he looks and sounds like he is trying to talk with his cheeks full of Ribena without spilling any. He. talks. in. syllables. and licks his lips practically mid-word. Cringe worthy. And I feel like I am always inconveniencing him just by being alive. Some mornings I get out of the bathroom and he is leaning against the wall with his arms folded across his chest in a ‘oh don’t mind me, I’m only WAITING’ gesture, which makes me want to punch him in the face.

One day I made the mistake of thoughtlessly leaving a magazine on his bed. He walked around the entire boat looking for me, which must have taken him at least 15 minutes, held up my magazine and asked, ‘Is this your magazine?’

'Yes.'

'Because I found it on my bed.'

'Oh sorry, I must have put it there by accident.' 

'Yes, well I found it on my bed and it is not my magazine.'

'Sorry about that'. We looked at each other in silence...

'Do you want me to take it, Gale?'

'No, but it is my bed and not my magazine.’

He spun around on his heels and returned to the cabin to place the magazine on my bed. Really?! For all the effort it took to walk around the boat on a witch hunt and have this inane conversation, why wouldn’t the twat just put the magazine back on my bed and rather use the energy towards being a normal human being? I haven't even gotten around to mentioning the water he leaves all over the bathroom, as if he splash-washes his face like something out of an Oxy Facewash ad. Or the fact that he never flushes his luminous pee down after he drains the proverbial pants pipe.

On days like these I’ve considered flushing a tampon down one of the toilets on board just to ruin his day.

High seas, low days.

So who the fuck am I and what am I talking about? I am what you call a stewardess. Or as I like to call it, a stupidess. This means that I am a glorified maid on a fancy pants super yacht, where I waste my degree and private school education cleaning the toilets, and get off on playing with rich people’s food with dirty hands. I have decided to write about it because when I work I am notoriously bad at keeping in contact. As a result, few bother to contact me, so with the decline in my online popularity, I no longer sit on Facebook willing my live feed to do something, yet am still obliged to sit on the internet, so I’d like it to be purposefully.

The second reason is that I have just taken a new job, and I work with a soulless and humourless bunch of robots who don’t understand sarcasm, which is 98% of my humour, and who think that political incorrectness is, well, incorrect. Of course, I could rant to someone who I actually know, but any of them would tell me to shut my spoilt face up and get on with it.

So instead I am going to put it out there into cyberspace, more for my own need to have a rant than for anyone else. I’ve always gotten rather annoyed at those people who status update their lives in real time as if the rest of the planet gives a fuck, and believed that only twats tweet, but I don’t pretend that many are vaguely interested.

Like most things that I start and never finish, I imagine that this blogging malarkey will be one of them. Either that or I will get sued by every boat owner I’ve ever worked for, in which case let me say now that none of this is true, and I spent it all already.

So from my previous experiences on all the other boats I've worked on, I’m used to having someone to play ‘guess who’s on their period’ or ‘find the Xanax’ with while cleaning cabins. You know, whatever gets you through the day. Instead, three days into my new job and I have to wake up to see my bucktoothed ginger co-worker, whose insincerity makes me want to grind my teeth flat. Whilst I have nothing against the ginger ninjas (the best lover I ever had was a sporter of a coppery hued beard), at any given minute of the day I want to tell her to do herself a fashion favour and never wear pink. Ever. Especially not as an eye shadow, because it looks like fucking conjunctivitis. And girl, put those gaddamned gnashers away before you hurt yourself or someone else. Everything about her stinks of kiss-arse, and I just want to sit the bitch down and tell her that she is everything but charming, and that her disingenuousness ain't winning her any friends, no matter how much pity they take on her for her small tits and scarecrow hair. Let’s call this girl Bill.

Bill is currently my boss. She is a short thing with the body of a twelve year old adolescent boy who always wears her hair in a ponytail pulled back from her face and clipped into place. She has taken over from an accomplished chief stewardess to ‘show me the ropes’ until the end of month. Really, she has been ‘promoted’ for a month as she is the captain’s girlfriend, and is therefore sleeping with the boss. She is as socially awkward as the captain who is also short and ginger, and they bring as much joy to daily life as Gary Glitter to a Vietnamese courtroom.

My captain, reminiscent of one of the trolls from Lord of the Rings without the beard and far less jolly, takes himself very seriously. Sure it’s a fancy yacht, but really homeboy just drives the bus. He talks on the VHF radio like a late night radio host, which makes me wonder if he indeed does think of himself as remotely attractive, or dare I say it, sexy even. The thought makes me want to swallow broken glass. He is so utterly filled with his own sense of self importance that he replies to all questions that the minions ask him in one word answers, like he doesn’t have the time for anything more while he sits in the crew mess eating everything under layers of Mrs. Balls mango chutney, no matter what it is. If I had known six years ago in university that I’d be subjected to watching his fucking face eat chutney with a side order of food, I would have had more sex, studied less and done more drugs...