Sampledelic

So, Adrienne and I sampled the Serenade of the Seas today...this is the best ship to sample, hands down. It's so great compared to the other ones because I've never been treated with anything less than disinterested neutrality by crew members, and frequently with a good deal more than that. They don't make a big stink about finding the environmental officer to fetch us, they don't act like we're a terrifying security risk, they don't try to intimidate us because they want a different pH reading, they just take us down, finish the paperwork, and escort us out. Today there was a new environmental officer (and the pain in the ass environmental officer on a different ship-which-shall-not-be-named-but-is-actually-surprisingly-hellish just left, thank goodness, so it must be the time of season for staff switcheroos) who was like a scruffy Croatian Andrew McCarthy - on second thought, Andrew McCarthy is the definition of scruffiness, anyway - and get a load of this, he took us on a handwashing detour after sampling before finishing up our visit. That is truly unprecedented. I usually just try to filch some hand sanitizer on the way out. Anyway, it was nice not to have that antagonism you find on some of the other ships. Oh, and the other great thing about the Serenade is that it tends to be at the last dock in the row, which has its own parking lot (parking is murder by day in the downtown) and which boards at a low enough deck that getting down to the sample port is a one-flight hop skip and a jump. Sometimes there are endless tortuous stairs and ladders and you've got to drag the sample kit and keep up with the jumpsuited engineer disappearing around the corner, and the air my god the air, the various different operations leaving heavy, specific, but very localized smells that just hang in the air - chlorine here, food there, garbage here, laundry there. But I've got it easy anyway, because often as not, someone offers to carry whatever I've got just because I'm a girl. The extended sampling that Dan and I did was particularly tragic, because he was sick as a dog and yet had the cooler (the bigger of the two containers, a full-sized cooler filled with full bottles of treated wastewater) and of course nobody was offering to take his load, meaning he was teetering at the top of each stairway. Meanwhile one of the lesser engineers had my bag, the smaller one (although I think he was very unpleasantly surprised by how heavy it was, as we had crammed an unusual amount into it for the occasion - it's usually quite manageable). Ah, well, it's pretty easy to smile benignly on chauvinism and admire it as chivalry when it comes from an international crew that I see for like an hour tops and means I don't have to carry heavy things.