Where in the world am I today?: At Sea aboard the EMERALD Princess
This little tip came to me recently while working on a couple of Princess Ships. Last week I was on the ISLAND Princess, this week I’m on the EMERALD Princess and on both ships the runs crossed time zones. It’s pretty easy to let the days blend together a bit when you’re doing a cruise ship contract because it’s a little like the experience that Bill Murray went through in “GroundhogDay.” The routine, the environment, the passengers all end up taking on a certain ‘same-ness’ to them that create’s a certain sense of deja vu and makes it very easy to miss a clock change or loose track of exactly what day it is. That being said, the cruise director does expect you to show up for your performances on time as to the technical teams from the various venues that you perform in aboard ship.
Though it didn’t effect my performances aboard the ISLAND Princess last week, I did experience a bit of a time-zone anomaly on the day I disembarked in Limon, Costa Rica. For whatever reason the ship doesn’t switch over to local time which is one hour earlier than ship time. I suspect that this is because the ship is only in this time zone for one day and it’s easier for everyone to not have to make the time switch for only one day… I set my cel phone’s alarm clock to wake me up with lots of time to finish packing the morning of my departure but what I didn’t realize was that my cel phone switched over to Costa Rican time when my phone was able to access the local network. This meant that when my alarm went off I actually got up an hour later (by ships time) than I had intended which made for a slightly more chaotic morning as I scrambled to get everything packed and ready to go.
Yesterday aboard the EMERALD I work up with the ship anchored off the coast of Princess’s private island in the Bahamas, Princess Cays. Woke up, went for some breakfast and got about my morning routine when I realized that the ship had crossed over a time zone change and it was actually an hour later than I had originally thought… This meant that all of a sudden I needed to re-think my day in terms of the things that I wanted to accomplish and how I was going to do it given the fact that I inadvertently misplaced an hour…
The simple solution to keeping track of time sits right on your desk in your cabin. The display on the top of the phone gives you the ship’s current time. There’s also the a channel on the TV in your cabin that keeps you up-to-date on such things as the ship’s current position, the time, weather conditions etc. So… When in doubt, it’s always a good idea to double check to make sure the time you think it is on the ship is actually the time that everyone else on the ship is working by.
