I wonder who Noah complained about on the Ark, or did Vasco da Gama give out about the conditions on his ship, or the Phoenician sailors did they have decent coffee at breaktime? They certainly didn’t have to hear the shite I hear anyway, the other day the deck cadet complained that the wireless internet was down, and he couldn’t connect the Skype on his laptop, I nodded and said “Ask the Chief Engineer for the gas burning torch and we’ll cut off the funnel, and the satellite will have line of sight, or we could wait until we get off this course….” He looked at me slightly perplexed as if he was considering the first option and didn’t understand my sarcasm.
I didn’t even speak to the old man when I was a cadet, unless he directly addressed me, I got a short sharp shock on my first bridge watch at sea, I happened to be sitting in the leather chair behind the “new” daylight screen radar, when the old man appeared and asked me if I was comfortable….I was I said to which he roared at me “Get the f..k outta ma chair” his face going puce and bits of spit flying in all directions, needless to say I vacated the chair pronto. Apparently the same “old man” had to retire early due to stress, I heard later.
The engineers all complained all the time about the deck officers or “rope draggers” or “window watchers” or the “c**ts on the bridge”, the deck officers complained about the “grease monkeys” and “steam queens” and the “spanner wankers” and the list goes on, what a fantastic environment for a young cadet. The Chief Engineer told me that there was no future in the job for me and I might as well pack it in. Encouraging.
There was no internet, no satellite TV, no e-mail, no mobile phones and the trips were 4 months long if you were lucky. I suppose I can’t complain too much, the Filipinos had 12 month contracts. You could call home making a link call on the VHF, not very private, anyone within 20 miles with a receiver could listen to you beg your girlfriend not to break it off, then some gobshite operator would give the price given in Swiss Francs after the call, and it only worked when you were near the coast, otherwise there was the Satellite phone for emergency’s, the price was a killer and the echo was a disaster, you started talking and there was a delay while your voice went into outer space and back down to earth, which meant you could end up talking on top of each other and end up saying “what was that?” a lot, nightmare. I didn’t make too many of them. There were letters of course, that arrived a month or too after being posted, so you could get a love letter and a “Dear John” from the same girl in the same post. It happened.
To be continued….
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