Hello from Rouen!
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Linda
20 Juli 2014 | Frankrijk, Rouen
Hi Everyone!
It has been a while since my last story, but here I am!!
I’m not sure if I have already told you, but our NR had managed to dig a hole for himself, deep enough to get himself fired, when he probably thought he would be redeemed!!
In the beginning of May the HM gave me the award for Employee of the month for April, which was a great surprise!! I hadn’t even been working here for 2 months and I already got that award!!
The same night, Jayson and the HM had a little talk with the NR about his conduct, they gave him a list of things he had done wrong, talked about it and asked him to sign it. Which he didn’t until he had writtten his own comments about them…he did this in an email, basically calling Jayson and the HM liars. He not only send this email to Jayson and the HM, but also to a couple of people in the Headoffice…which was a stupid mistake, because that got him fired!! We still had to put up with him for another week, but the thought that it was only for one more week, made it bearable!!
Then on his last morning, he did manage to go out with a bang, as they say!! We had a group of 7 people leaving early in the morning to go to the airport, taxi was on time, no problem. But according to the NR the van wouldn’t hold 7 people with their luggage…so he called a cab for 2 people. He then called the Cruisedirector to tell her of this problem, she told him to pay the taxidriver he had called 50 euros and she would pay him back.
Then the taxidriver he had called came back and demanded to be paid the fare for going to the airport and coming back…we wondered why he would come back in the first place, because we didn’t have a pick up for him at that time…turned out that the NR had told him to go to the airtport and then come back for the receipt….anybody in their right mind would say the driver was right for demanding the double fair, because he had to come back for a piece of paper….
Then later that morning, the driver of the van who was supposed to pick up the 7 people came back to pick up another group and he told us that his van was a 7 seater, but that the NR had decided that that wouldn’t fit….as if the driver wouldn’t know the size of his own van!!!!!
You should have seen the Cruise director, she was ready to kill him!!!!!!
She called the NR to the office to demand his explanation..his answer to getting the one cab to come back for the receipt was that it was a payment and we needed it…he was right about that, but normal people would ask for the receipt before he takes off!!!
And I don’t know what his explanation was for the van, but he actually got out to check the size of the van…..it was most unfortunate that he couldn’t be fired twice!!!!
Then when he was about to leave, he had another dumb thing!!!
A couple of weeks ago, we asked him to get some stamps to sell to the guests. Now we only sell postcards, which are not to big and when you see what people scriblle on them, they need all the space they can get, so we have small stamps…he comes back with really big ones, saying that was all they had…which means you shouldn’t buy them, because we can’t use them!
Anyway, we send him back to exchange them for smaller ones. He comes back with smaller ones, letting us believe he had managed to exchange them…when all the while he still had the large stamps and the receipt for that..he actually demanded the money back for that, but Jayson told him off, he said he could keep the big stamps as a souvenir of France!!!! Idiot, and then he calls the HM and Jayson liars?!
Anyway, he’s gone now and we have Geanina as NR, she’s a really nice and smart girl, so we make a really good team!!! We really are Charlie’s Angels!!!
So far she still likes the job and I hope she will continu to do so!!!
In the meantime I have also been asked to take over for Jayson when he is on vacation!!! Which means I’m going to be a Senior for 2 weeks in July!!!
Jayson and I had talked about it before, but I didn’t want to do it, because I had just begun as a Second. But now the HM asked me if I wanted to do this, not wanting to force me into doing something I didn’t want to do, but from what she’s seen, she thought I would be capable(sp?) of doing this…so I said yes!! Besides this they also don’t know who’s going to replace us, it might be someone who doesn’t know what to do either and would need training, since I’m here already it would be just as handy to start training me. Then during the next few weeks they are going to see if Geanina will be capable to take my job while I’m gone, so they would only have to train a new NR. Which is the easiest job of the three.
And after that question they gave me the award to go with my, what do you call this?? The paper that people have hanging on their walls in their office saying they have acchieved something great….anyway, it’s a heavy glass thing in a nice blue box and it’s ingraved, looks really nice!!
Never had this before, so I’m really happy with it!!
Meanwhile jayson has been showing me the ropes of what a Senior does…it looks harder then it is. He still doesn’t know it all by heart either and has lists of what to do and how to do it, so it shouldn’t be a big problem. But it is a bit hard, because I have to train for this and still do my own job. On mondaynight we close the accounts of the guests, which means we send a message to the creditcard companies that we want to charge money.
In order to do this without being disturbed by questions, we do this at night, when all the guests are sleeping. Last Monday it was 00:30am when I got to the reception and 01:45am when I was in bed…..and I was back at the reception at 05:30am to help the cruise director sending off a large group of guests…then when most of them were gone, jayson showed me how to close that cruise and open the one for the new group in the afternoon.
Fortunately he helped me do my job, which is place new papers in the rooms for the new group, then I had half an hour to sleep and then it was back to work again…
Fortunately I was off at 7:30pm that day and got to bed early!!
So it is a bit of hard work and I try to sleep in the afternoons now to keep up with it all. It is only for another couple of weeks, then I have my vacation and then when I come back I will be a Senior for the two weeks that jayson has off. After that it is back to normal!!!
I do like the fact that they gave me this opportunity, here where I thought they had hired me because they might think I had worked on a large cruiseship before!!
But they like me for me and for what I do…of course I made several mistakes after getting the award, which P…d me off big time!! But then I remembered that I haven’t even been here for 2 months, before they gave me the award and asked me to be Senior, so I’m good!!!!
It’s been 2 months and 9 days now, since I started working here. I still like my job, like to interaction with the guests. To be honest living on the ship is the hardest thing to get used to, probably also depends on where you are and who you are with. I’m not very fortunate with this roommate, no doubt I got a chaotic person to learn how to cope with that, but there’s still a change that she will be transferred and I’m praying as hard as she is that that will happen soon!!!
O I keep forgetting to give you an address!!! I have an address here in France if you feel like sending me some real mail, instead of an email!!
The address is:
AGIS – for MS Avalon Creativity
Linda Damhuis
8 Rue Grand Pont
F-76000
Rouen
La France
Agis is the agent here in Rouen, everytime we are here, he comes to the ship to give us our mail. We are only in Rouen on Thursday and Friday, so depending on when you send it, when he gets it and when we are in Rouen, it might take longer to get to me then you would expect. But be sure that I will let you know whenever I get something in the mail, so you’ll know it worked out allright!!!
That’s it for today, I’ll try to write again soon!
Love Linda
Reageer op dit reisverslag
Je kunt nu ook Smileys gebruiken. Via de toolbar, toetsenbord of door eerst : te typen en dan een woord bijvoorbeeld :smiley