questions.
If you want to meet people on a cruise ship, you could do worse than working at Passenger Services, as you do get to meet just about everyone during the week or so that a typical Caribbean cruise lasts. At one time or another, every passenger is likely to need Passenger Services for something.
Sure enough, Jessica did meet a lot of people. She chased down lost dry cleaning. She replaced batteries in stateroom safes. She tracked down lost luggage, and occasionally, she tracked down missing children or senior citizens. The job kept her busy, and she found the work interesting, as the sorts of things she was asked to do changed nearly every day.
So far, however, she hadn't really met any interesting people. While all sorts of people take cruises, the passenger list does tend to skew towards the elderly. There were hundreds of senior citizens aboard the Ocean Enchantment . There were some younger men, including a number of handsome ones, but Jessica quickly discovered that nice looking men don't take cruises alone - they take them with their wives or girlfriends. While single women will take cruises with other single women, single men almost never take cruises with their male friends. If a guy is on a ship, it's a virtual certainty that there's a woman with him.
Not that it mattered, anyway, since employees of the Ocean Enchantment were strictly forbidden from having any sort of nonprofessional interaction with passengers. That was company policy, and it was rigidly enforced. If you're caught getting involved with a passenger, you'll be off the ship at the next port.
I guess I'll have to find some interesting things to write about, rather than some interesting guys.
Still, the job was fun, and the ship did have a lot of great amenities. The ship was in various Caribbean ports several days a week, and Jessica loved shopping and catching some sun on the beach when she had occasional time off while the ship was in port.
She also managed to keep entertained during her off-hours while on board the ship. While using the passenger facilities was more or less off-limits, the cruise line did provide quite a lot of things to do for their off-duty employees.
The crew dining room was nice enough, offering a large variety of food that was reasonably tasty. The offerings weren't quite as fancy as what the passengers ate, but it was certainly good enough. There was also a crew-only swimming pool as well as a fitness center. The fitness center was small, but had a number of different exercise machines as well as free weights and a small aerobics area. Jessica spent some time in the gym every day, doing her best to keep fit. It's easy to eat too much and exercise too little on a cruise ship, even for employees. The food is always there, and it's both fattening and plentiful.
The best of the employee facilities was probably the employee bar. Located near the front of the ship, the bar was probably the most popular off-duty hangout for crew members. Besides offering a place to get a drink the bar also included a pool table, a Foosball table, a jukebox and several windows, which gave the room something that most crew areas didn't have - real light.
Jessica frequently visited the crew bar after the end of her shift just to unwind with a cocktail after a long day. It gave her an opportunity to meet some of the people who worked in other parts of the ship that she rarely had a chance to see. Some of the people came from some pretty exotic places, and that gave her an opportunity to learn more about how people live around the world. It was certainly better than spending time in her tiny little cabin, alone with her Kindle and her vibrator.
Still, after three months on the ship, she'd yet to meet any interesting guys or come up with a can't-miss story idea. She took a sip of her Cosmopolitan and wondered if the remaining five months on