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Name: Audrey
Interests: music, writing music, singing, cruise ships, the Spanish language, foreign people, traveling, reading, theology, biblical archaeology, photography, playing piano
Expertise: confection of bon bons. for real, yo.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message me
Member Since:
1/10/2005
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| Ugh
Well, if you ever want to feel like you're about 70 iq points lower than a Harvard student, and will never amount to anything more interesting than a domestic engineer, check out the first step of facebook's application process.
Don't get me wrong. I don't dream of working for facebook. I don't code. Heck, I'm not even smart. I just read an article about the founder, and somehow I ended up there... Cousin Elizabeth, eat your heart out. | | |
| YAY FOR 15 HOUR DAYS
So, I’m almost two months into Alaska: Round Four. The old jimmy buses that we drive (sans power steering) made me nervous at first. And the fact that my first time driving alone was with one of those buses--while on tour with forty people--was something I didn’t even want to think about. When I first started this job, I would show up a half hour early so I could take my time going over my coach, pre-tripping it, and struggling to get my brake tests in the right order.
Now I’m comfortable. I can pretrip my bus with time to spare. I have each coach’s idiosyncracies are under control, even Son of a Gun 771, to whom I give a “no funny business” pep talk before driving. The mechanics, no doubt, are happy that I pester them less with silly questions about how to tighten the wingnut (righty tighty, lefty loosey), and how to unlock the luggage bays (push the “luggage bay unlock” button). If I have to, I’ll even slide under the bus myself to check that the dual tires aren’t touching. Yeah, I’m pretty much a super star.
In general, though, it was never really the buses that freaked me-- it was the people, or at least the tours themselves. The first week was okay, even with my, shall we say, “colorful” BOS (Best of Skagway) tour. The next week, I cried for hours straight. It probably wouldn’t have gone on so long, but I live in a house with twenty people, and every ten minutes someone would say, “You seem upset; let’s talk.” Other than that, I was exhausted. I had had three big days (6 am to 9 pm, half of which were spent in the Yukon) and when I called the dispatcher to remind her of my request for a lighter day, she said, “Do you consider a Yukon with Train (8 hour tour, 13 hour day) a lighter day?”
Plus the dreams had started. I usually don’t even remember dreams, let alone have recurring ones. But I found, after multiple long, “colorful” days on tour, knowing I have another big tour the next day, I have a certain dream. In this dream, I park a bus full of passengers in our bus yard, and I just leave them there. Then I go to bed--on the clock. And because I’m their tour guide, and I’m in charge of what they do, some of them follow me to my bedroom and watch me while I sleep, poking at my feet to ask, “Audrey, what’s our next stop?” I wake up at 2 am thinking, “I can’t pre-trip a bus while they’re in there...It’s so unprofessional!” And although I wake up at 2:20, 2:40, 3:10, 3:40, 4:30 and 5:10 (oh, time to get up) I don’t quite remember that it’s just a dream and I don’t have to get up.... And due to the ensuing lack of sleep, I literally--LITERALLY--almost fell asleep driving with 42 people on my bus my second day in the Yukon. (“Let’s take a picture stop, shall we?” “Why? What do we take a picture of?” “Just get out, will you?”)
The last few Yukon tours--my longest tours, which go for 8 hours--have been going pretty well. My first good Yukon, some anonymous figure kept leaving me Princess pillow chocolates on my seat at every picture stop. (You know it had to have been grandma, collecting and dispensing treats.) A bunch of people hugged me, and my group gave me an envelope full of tip money they had collected for me before my tour ended. It’s actually a bad thing for your tips if they do that--it can knock $50 off your earnings. But I didn’t care. I was just glad to have survived the day incident-free...
My latest Yukon had all of 8 people on tour. Yes, seriously--I drove a 43 foot bus into the Yukon with 8 people, gettinng 6 miles to the gallon. Yeehaw. Alaskans for global warming! I was really anxious that it would be a bad day--awkward. But I learned all their names, and we got on great. They didn’t even tell U.S. Customs that I smuggled cuban cigars over the border. Bless. They had a good time and they were generous to me; they even wrote to the ship, commending me--which was cool, because one of my girl friends runs that ship.
I was pretty excited one day because I actually got a one hundred dollar bill as a tip. One hundred dollars is five times that which I consider to be a good tip. One hundred dollars is actually unheard of (until now). To have gotten such a crazy tip in my third week of work was HUGE ego boost. I ran into the office and said to the managers (my friends, who, until this year, had been drivers like me), “I just have ONE thing to say about my Scenic Highlights tour.” I threw down all my tip money--5’s, 10’s and 20’s only--like it was trash and whipped out my benjamin for them to take a good look. Their jaws dropped, and Julie, Carlee and Shandra started yelling and and laughing. “No way! No way! Shut up! No way! That is freaking awesome.” Yeah, it was a pretty good day.
In other news, I cut my hair. My whole life, I’ve always had long hair--at least, since I was four. I like that nostalgia. Holly says I look older, but I think I look like I did as a little girl. Yesterday, I went halfway through a tour with my newly short hair loosely around my chin, then decided at a lunch stop to put it in pig tails. I asked my group if they liked my hair, and told them this was my “Yeah, not a single one of you has to take me seriously the rest of the tour” look.
well, that’s all for now.. | | |
| A DAY IN THE LIFE...
You know when you have an awful day, when life has done you wrong and you don't know how things can get any worse...then suddenly, it does? You know that "cherry on top" that sort of sets it all off? Yeah... I'm beyond cherries. There is nothing to put me over the edge anymore. You just can't do it.
It was my first Best of Skagway tour. This tour enters Canada. As much as I love causing international incidents with Officers Beyonce and the Silver Fox at Canadian customs, the company has this itty bitty preference for not having its bus load of 45 people detained at the crossing because some old koot felt like customs agents are just a failing extension of Princess Cruises customer service.
After being in Princess customer service for three years, I've seen my share of angry pax--but there are lots more where they came from. So of course, before I had even left the dock, I received in my group the most irate passenger I have ever met. He didn't say a lot, but the look of disgust he gave me was almost a work of art.
Of course. Obviously he ends up on my bus.
Whatever, I don't care. I am not even phased.
Anyway, he's upset enough for both of us. He shows me only his ticket, rolls his eyes at the mention of a passport, then produces his cruise card, waving it like a crucifix in front of a vampire. "Yes sir, that's great," I smile, "Thank you, but I need to check your passport, though, too."
"It didna say passaport anywhere! No need passport!"
I fake a look of confusion and theatrically examine his ticket. "Oh! There it is! Tour enters Canada," I say with forced brightness, "Must bring passport."
"Too difficult!" He says, "No need passport!"
And he stalks angrily past me onto my bus. His wife, more conciliatory, says that they do have passports on the ship. I tell her they will have to go get them.
"We U.S. citizen," her husband spits. "From L.A.!" (Figures, doesn't it?) "Room A202!"
I said, "Yes, we are all U.S. citizens. All these people are bringing their passports. I'm bringing my passport." I smile apologetically, although I don't feel so much apologetic as sadistic in the sense that I wanted to kick this guy who is obviously the worst mix of passenger qualities (meaning, stupid and rude) quickly off my bus.
All my normal pax start yelling at him, so he and his wife go back to the ship and retrieve their passports. I have another group of four with the same problem who come five minutes after, but they are okay. A sweet old lady grabbed me and said that rowdy guests had upset her, but I did well with them. It was nothing, of course.
As we are waiting, my other guests become anxious, concerned they will miss the train. I told them that we will wait for the missing passengers as long as we can, but in truth, we can only do so for so long, or we will make the train late, which, in Skagway, is a cardinal sin. If you make one train late, you make the next train late, and the next, and the next, and, short story long, everyone depends on these trains, and then you literally make the entire town late.
So my people return, and somehow I end up with all guests and passports accounted for--including my old friend and his shiny new passport.
We get rolling. We're late, but I understand the train was a bit late anyway. Actually, it was VERY late. We got stuck behind the train at the railroad crossing, and as we sat there I told them everything I could possibly think of about Pullen Pond, which was the only thing near us that didn't look like a winnebago. The train moves, and I'm ready to pull into the station and dump my people off at their first stop. Except there's nowhere to park. The traffic today was doubled, due to all the passenger vehicles trying to pick up passengers when the unloaders like me were supposed to be coming in. So... I circle around the block, radioing managment as I go, requesting someone to camp out in a space for me. I turn on 3rd. Dumb choice, in hindsight, as there were cars pulled right up to both corners. Okay, I was in a 40 foot bus with no power steering (have you ever seen Speed? It's that kind of bus--an old GMC), and a few hundred people wandering about, brains clearly on vacation, could be a challenge. So, I can't make the turn. I need less than a foot of space more. I'm on Broadway, and I simply cannot back up on my own. (Although I was tempted, when one old lady from the crosswalk scowled at me and shook her head disapprovingly). But instead I radio managment. My pax know what's up. Of course I have three men on my bus that operate heavy machinery who volunteer to help--ie, they continued to quiz me later about my equpiment, while examining my every move. Going down the pass, they asked, "Do you have a good jake brake?" Between that, and all the well-intentioned, "YOU're driving the bus, little lady? Well GOOD for YOU!"s I couldn't help but respond, "What's a jake brake?" (They got the point.)
Anyway, Carlee runs from our office on 1st, and waves me back. It's fine, I don't care, any day's a good day for me to bomb on tour. Whatever. Then we're stuck behind an ACT coach, who has the same thing in mind--getting to the depot. He can't, because coaches from three other companies are cutting him off. My managers radio me to inform me they are going to show up to the unusually congested train area and back me into a somewhat illegal parking place so I could unload. Carlee shows up to save the day again, directing me to pull into the middle of the road, and hang out there. I've been nonchalantly narrating things around town and what I am doing to my passengers, so I just tell them, "Yeah, I'm gonna sit here in the middle of the road, and I'm okay with that. Do you guys feel good about this?" They did. And then a space opened up, and I had all my pax clap for Carlee. All things considered... That went well.
I deadhead up the pass into Canada to meet my people. Of course it's completely fogged in, and I'm going 10 miles an hour, racking my brain for things to say in the fog. It was bad enough with Tormented Valley being covered in snow. It's kind of lame when a tour guide says, "Okay, please trust me when I tell you that there is a mountain to your left."
I pick the kids up at Fraser, B.C., a good two hours later. We don't have time to make picture stops on the way down, and I'm glad no one protests. Maybe the fog was not totally against me. We get straight into Liarsville Tent City. People have grilled salmon, watch a show, do some gold panning, feed the malamute cookies (to which she responds with a healthy batch of diarrhea, thanks guys), then I am given a time to arrive at the Red Onion. I have to leave the camp first, but show up at the R.O. ten minutes after the guy behind me. When the town is 4 blocks by 22 blocks long, and the tour has been going as disastrously as mine has, this is kind of a death sentence.
It's distracting having Alex, my co-driver, following just behind me, knowing he had to pass me somehow, so I turn off a little earlier, and I tell them about the clinic that serves as our hospital. I talk about how we have no doctors in Skagway, we don't have kids born here, and the population never grows because every time a kid is born a man leaves town, and blah, blah... I pass the bank and tell about the one bank robbery it suffered, where the guy accidentally blew himself up, and they kept his skull in the vault... I get to the post office and point out how convenient for us it is to have the only post-office drop-box in town to be directly in front of the post office, and someone mentions that they want to stop to mail something. I almost shout with joy and tell them this works out perfectly, as I need to stall before getting to the Red Onion. The whole bus is okay with this. I make a right turn...
And I can't make the damn turn. I radio managment. They come to back me. Both managment and I realize there is something wrong with my bus. They follow me to the next turn, and they have to back me in that turn, as well. By this point, I have definitely checked out. My dignity is gone... I've totally bombed, and I'm glad I never have to see these people again. The managment car continued to follow me around the rest of the night, just in case.
At the post office, I run back to the managment car to confer, and my cute, sweet little boss Shandra asks me if I'm doing okay. I had checked out, but I was okay. But I forgot the deadly power in Shandra's eyes--the look of sincerity that could make a granite ROCK cry, and I told her, "I love you but I can't look at you, I gotta go I'm on tour."
In the end, they tipped me well, surprisingly. No one complained. No one gave me any humiliating, "Way to keep it together, you still did good." Although one guy got off my bus, squeezed my biceps and said, "Heh, heh..."
When I got home, I was putting things in my bag away and discovered that my shiny new princess cruises water bottle had leaked all over my passport. Of course. It would, wouldn't it?
Update: Last night, the shorex from that ship called me (he's a really good friend) and excitedly told me that I had received a really good comment card from one of the passengers on my bus. He was excited because it was the first he'd ever seen of me (because it was my first day for him), and because I had already told him how disastrous my tour was. It wasn't even just one of those "She gave a good tour." It was, "She was attentive to all of her passengers, she was knowledgeable, she had a good sense of humor, she made the tour fun and she was just a really good tour guide in general."
/longest blog entry in months and months | | |
| HERE WE GO . . .
I think I probably neglected to mention that I have been training to drive buses the past few months, and I am currently in Alaska for the tourist season... and I'm slated to give my first tours tomorrow. I'm nervous. Not like, shaking nervous--that'll probably happen tomorrow (remind me not to have caffeine)--just totally anxious. It's just been so long since I have performed. But I'm not used to it anymore. And to be honest, my eyes are bothering me a lot today. Personally, I think that spells danger. But my bosses, the DMV and even the doctor cleared me... but then they don't know what it feels like...
Anyways, just pray that I don't drive the bus into the fjord, or start talking about the alamo instead!
Actually, what I am most worried about it is showing up to my stops at the right time...or doing something stupid, like turning down the wrong street, or tripping up over my words--or freezing up all together. There's no reason for that, though, really--I am a fantastic B.S.-er. I also worry about about what it'll be like when I'm talking, and and I have to make a turn at the same time--in my old 1970s bus that has no power steering. (You've seen Speed, right? Yeah, that's the bus.) I think I'll just make up some crap story about having already chipped my tooth here in Skagway and not wanting to do it again on a slightly intense grunt. (Oh wait, that's actually true.)
Yeah, these are things I will tell on my blog. But for my tour?
help | | |
| SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME, BUT NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT Have you ever sung the national anthem with a small camera stuck down your nose? Apparently knowing all the words to that song puts me in the minority. Hmm.. | | |
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