After my extended vacation
I returned home to my beautiful Spanish island and took a further two months to
‘look for work’. It was finally in April that I flew to France to meet my new
boat of employment. Unlike The Good Ship where it was all fun and games, I now
work on motoryacht Joke Boat, where everything is, to put it lightly, a joke.
Upon arrival at Nice
Airport I was met by a grey, hunched man who looks alarmingly like Moe from the
Simpsons.
Unfortunately this
individual has neither Moe’s cynicism nor his wit, and can only be comparable
in their taste for one thing; the bar. This is Ron, my new captain.
Ron is American and is as
gung-ho as he is goofy. He has an extended upper lip, small glassy eyes, and
big, white veneers that combine to make him look stupid when he smiles, which
is all too often.
When he walks he leads with his head and his hips at the same
time, and when he stops he seems to be half-sitting on an imaginary barstool.
This makes him look like he is ready to spring into action at any given moment,
although it is very apparent even upon the first meeting, that Ron isn’t
capable of doing anything quickly.
Ron likes to pass on
little jobs here and there until his entire workload had been successfully
dispersed, and he has thus never really developed any actual skills as a captain.
As a mutual acquaintance described it, “Ron will ‘one-more-thing’ you to death”.
Due to his limited capabilities and his reputation of being unemployable in the States, Ron
has spent the last 10 years working on little more than small bare-back charter
boats (the maritime equivalent of caravanning), temping and delivering dinghies
from here to there. Until he got this job that is, from a sympathetic pal.
Ron is also self
unaware and has a hero complex to boot, which results in him shamelessly
seeking gratification for the little that he actually does do.
‘Good thing I picked you
up from the airport, hey kiddo!’ he said in the car on the way back to the boat
when we’d just met.
To be clear, if he hadn’t
I would have just taken a taxi from the airport and charged it back to the boat
as I did with my flight, and would not have to endure being called kiddo. I smiled
and nodded in agreement, and thought to myself, ‘Oh come on, it ain’t that bad,
kiddo’...
