In a post I composed while my wife and I were on our cruise this summer, I noted that there seemed to be a lot of complainers on the ship.
An article in the New York Times has me thankful that the complainers on Crown Princess weren’t as obnoxious as some observed recently on Sapphire Princess:
“First there was a group of what I’d call rabble-rousers, led by a lawyer,” she said. “We were missing all of these ports, and they felt they weren’t getting the truth” from the ship’s officers. At one point, with passengers assembled in the ship’s theater, she said, “the attorney jumped up and grabbed the microphone away from the assistant cruise director and said: ‘We’re taking over the stage! We have a petition!’”[...]
“There was a big shouting match with the captain,” she said. “One passenger was telling everybody he was captain of a yacht back home.” He stormed the bridge with Google Earth printouts, she said, and demanded to show the captain how to navigate around the storm.
As the ship approached its final port, near Beijing, a few passengers threatened to barricade themselves in their staterooms unless they got $1,000 in chits and a free cruise. Resistance collapsed when the captain noted that the police in Beijing would probably not be in the mood for negotiation, Ms. Spencer Brown said.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned (even if I often forget it), it’s that sometimes you just need to take life’s unexpected twists in stride. Life can get so depressing if you dwell on every little thing that is imperfect or doesn’t go as planned. And true, I can expect folks to be somewhat upset if they don’t get what they perceive is value for money spent… near-mutiny is a bit of an overreaction, don’tcha think?