Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now is a sixteen-story floating hotel with bedrooms for 4,900 guests. It has fifteen bars, seven restaurants, three pools, indoor skydiving, and two theaters. Sixteen hundred crew members are charged with the ongoing task of keeping the passengers comfortable, fed, and entertained. This is where I come in.

I am a stage technician for a cruise ship, and my job is to handle the logistical and technical aspects of entertainment. An average day for me includes setting up jazz quartets, scheduling the stage technician team to put on the three different main stage production shows, organizing staff for the multiple fly-in acts we have every week, and setting up, and taking down, a medley of other things around the ship. I am part of what is called the ‘Cruise Division’, the people whose job it is to make cruising fun. That includes all the entertainment staff hosting the trivias and scavenger hunts, our youth staff team, all of the sports team who run the volleyball games, the roller discos, the bumper cars and surf simulator and circus school. Oh, and our in-house TV studio people. My colleagues in the theater include a small army of dancers, singers, aerialists, professional musicians, and more. On some ships the entertainment squad also includes high-divers or an ice skating cast, but not this one, though I have worked in the ice rink on a smaller ship.

The technicians (other people like me) are called ‘blackshirts’. We have two main venues to take care of on this ship. Our main theater is where most of nightly MainStage entertainment takes place. Here is where you will find your jugglers, Celine Dion tributes, hypnotists, concert pianists, magicians, ventriloquists, comedians, and on one bizarre occasion a shadow puppet specialist. It has a Victorian themed cabaret and a Vegas showgirl show. I always feel short when I’m backstage in the theater because we have twelve showgirls running around back there and they’re all required to be 5’8” before they put their heels on.

Then there’s the giant glass cave that takes up the entire back of the ship which is where I spend most of my time. The room I work in on the ship cost $42,000,000, and for good reason. We have a 25’ x 110’ projection screen that turns into an IMAX theater. We have six 7’ x 4’ LED screens mounted on robotic arms originally designed to weld cars that can dance in time to music. People pop up out of the floor and drop out of the ceiling. It’s a veritable cave of wonders. I’m sure that from where the audience is sitting the show looks fantastic, but from my show-time position under the stage, it’s mostly very dark. My workspace is pretty much a cellar filled with heavy machinery and lots of people in sequined spandex. During the show I’ll wait for a cue in the music, hold a button down, and a chute like a human-sized dumbwaiter will drop a section of the stage floor down to my level. We call these ‘toaster lifts’.  I’ll load a dancer into the chute, wait for another musical cue, then send them back up. Then I run away to move an entire staircase off a rolling platform. While the dancers are out there dazzling everyone, the tech team is in the ceiling and under the floor, moving around giant set pieces as quietly as possible in the darkness while not running anyone over. Before all else, our job is about safety.

Working on a cruise ship is an all-encompassing lifestyle, and there are certainly some glamorous aspects of the job I do. I got to climb a mountain in Alaska over my lunch break the other day, and when I was finished working for the evening I went upstairs where my friends were teaching a trapeze clinic, after which I was asked if I still had the energy for indoor skydiving. (I’m afraid I did not.) Sometimes when I go to the gym I can see pods of dolphins or whales or the sunset over Alaskan Mountains. I work with people of approximately 60 different nationalities, so the crew bar is a pretty multilingual place. The social aspect can be pretty great too. The other night I went to a pajama party where twelve world class musicians and a DJ were hosting a jam night. A professional beat-boxer came in and did a set just because he felt like it, and a literal breakdance battle broke out. It’s a bit like living in a movie musical. Oh, and I seldom get up before nine in the morning.

There are of course downsides to all this. I sleep late because I work late — it’s not unusual for me to finish work after one a.m. I have one massive seven month workday that has no weekends or public holidays, and I live in a tiny windowless room with a roommate that is usually not of my choosing. Internet is four dollars an hour. I eat in the equivalent of a high school cafeteria three meals a day unless I happen to be in port.  If someone bothers you, you cannot get away from them because they are always there. At work, at lunch, at dinner, in the bar, in the bathrooms, potentially even in your room if you’re unlucky. Privacy is hard to come by.  Particularly frustrating is having to be nice to all the guests all the time even if they are rude to you. Some people come onboard with the attitude that since they paid for the cruise, they own the ship now, and therefore also you. I understand customer service, but it is a hard thing to do for seven continuous months. I frequently miss Christmas at home while having to make sure hundreds of random tourists are having a magical holiday experience. And, yes, occasionally I do get seasick.

Then, of course, there are the parts of my job I would describe as just weird. Every time a ship crosses the equator, you have to have an ‘equator crossing ceremony’. If you have never crossed the equator before, you are referred to as a ‘pollywog’ and get hazed by the other crew. Cruise ships don’t do equator crossings very often, so they make a big spectacle of the ceremony for the guests. The first year I was working on ships I was a pollywog, so I was brought up to the pool deck with some other hapless new kids and was ceremoniously coated in flour, raw eggs, spaghetti and sauce, and slapped with a giant fish by a guy dressed as Poseidon in front of  hundreds of laughing tourists. Then I had to stand on a tarp so the guests could take pictures with me and my fellow pollywogs (from a few feet away so we didn’t get them dirty.)

The cruise industry is terrified of Norovirus and other gastrointestinal illnesses (our catchall term is ‘GI’) so we constantly have to sanitize everything. We call this the Outbreak Prevention Plan — ‘OPP 1’ for short. If more than six people in six hours report nausea or vomiting to our medical team, ’OPP 2’ kicks in. Every frequently touched surface (elevator buttons, bannisters) gets sanitized every fifteen minutes, and we have to sanitize the theaters. We do this with a highly pressurized canister of chemicals on a rolling cart attached by a hose to a telescope shaped gun. Kitted out in goggles and an air filtration mask, one person drags the canister-cart around while the other sprays all the seats in the theater. We look like ghost-busters. If this fails to stop the outbreak, we level up again (OPP 3) and stop all self-service food on the ship, which means that every person other than the captain suddenly has a second job serving scrambled eggs in the buffet. Once a month I am required to bring my shower head to a divisional meeting. I have to drop it in a bucket of bleach and let it soak for the duration of the meeting and then sign a bunch of paperwork stating that I understand it is important to sanitize my showerhead and I hereby agree to also wash my hands a lot.

For the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve, my division gets together and blows up thousands of balloons, which get stuffed into nets the size of baby whales and my colleagues and I have to carry them into the main street of the ship and suspend them from the ceiling so we can release them at midnight. Balloon drops are incredibly stressful because it’s really obvious when something goes wrong, like the string to release them gets tangled or you accidentally drop a blimp-sized net of balloons on a giant crowd of drunk people. New Year’s is worse because you have to time the balloon release correctly to coincide with the countdown, but then you get the joy of watching all those beautifully dressed people immediately lose their composure and start stomping balloons to death.

Sometimes birds land on the ship in port and find their way into the guest hallways, and if you find one you have to try to contain it until you can get ahold of the chief horticulturalist onboard. It is a surreal experience to have to try to corral a seagull into a broom closet.

Any complaints aside, I love my job. I’m still not over the fact that someone built this floating masterpiece and crammed it with millions of dollars’ worth of theater toys and then trusted me to be in charge of them. I have been to at least 60 different countries since I started working here, and I get to travel and do work that I love at the same time. That being said, I’m glad I came home when I did. I’ve literally been around the world and can say with confidence there is no place like Hampton in the fall.

Erin White