So I graduated college this year from the Homunculus School of Engineering with a sparkle in my eyes, a pocket full of sunshine, and no clue of the utterly weird and wonderful, garden-of-earthly-delights-styled hell that was to become my life. To kick off the end of our old lives, and the start of a new year, my college friends and I planned a cruise that stretched from mid December to right before Christmas. We had planned this about a year ago, before any of us had jobs or grad school acceptance letters, with the exception of my one friend Luigi. Waluigi, their partner Wario, and I were absolutely going through the shit wringer of job + grad school applications (on top of the much milder piss wringer of being any sort of engineering student). Despite all our rage, and our statuses as rats in a cage, we booked four ludicrously cheap cruise tickets with a cruise line that rhymes with Norwegian Cruise Lines.
Unfortunately, booking a cruise on a college student budget means spending 11 nights larping as sardines.
But beyond the profane aroma born of four showerless and bitchless engineers living in a single room, the sleeping arrangements were alright.
And the excursions were also alright.
The beaches of Aruba were nice, but the buildings of Oranjestad reminded me of Irvine California. Walking between the stores trying to sell me duty free jewelry and duty free Crocs, I couldn't help but feel a little saddened by the complete lack of character and identity of the city beyond that of "buy our shit". Also, the non-Dutch national language of Aruba, Papiamento, is an absolutely wonderful fever dream of a language. If Dutch, Spanish, and Portugese had very intimate and romantic sex, their child still wouldn't be Papiamento because there weren't enough electrified nipple suckers and kinks during conception.
Curaçao was pretty cool. The buildings were very cute and very Dutch, and the over-engineered bridge tickled the part of brain that likes to build with redstone in Minecraft.
Grand Cayman might have been my favorite, not because of anything that was there. Oh no, I was specifically intrigued by the things that weren't there--like a local economy that wasn't being held at gunpoint by the tourism industry and offshore banking. The tour guide, bless him, reminded the bus full boomers of this fact, and the other fact that Kenneth Dart owns about 43% of the Cayman Islands. He also let us know that literally everything is imported, the power grid is a bunch of generators wired up with some bubblegum, and the housing market is just as fucked as any city in the US.
As for the cruise itself, it was kind of shit. Now, don't just take my word for it. My friend Wario, who is the type of fella to keel over dead from being in a room next to a peanut, is also the type of fella to know how to "cruise really well", as he puts it. Even this man, who willingly and regularly subjects himself and his partner to the unfathomable suffering of being stuck on a boat for a week, thought that this cruise was a little much. The "cruise" was more like an oversized yatch, and felt like a floating retirement home with how far right the age bellcurve skewed. God forbid I even DREAM of walking at a pace that is even mildly brisker than the rate at which snails fuck, because the wall of 80 year old human flesh shambles at ONLY one speed.
Now, I don't want to come across as ageist, because I know a lot of really cool, really kickass older people. But holy shit. The things that came out of these geezers' mouths were horrendous. This cruise was perhaps the most back-to-back exposure to verbal spousal abuse that I'll ever receive in my life. There was a moment where my friends and I were waiting in the elevator as a man berated his wife to the point of tears, followed by another elevator ride in which another old man made some vaguely insulting comment about Waluigi and Wario.
The million dollar question that had been on my mind since day one was "where the poop go"? Though, my question was specifically "how the poop go"?
In fact, this question had bothered me so much, that I asked the chief engineer to explain the plumbing in great detail during the cruise Q&A with the captain, engineer, and manager. As an aside, I was very pleased to see that my question brought a smile on his face, as nobody had asked him a single question during the hour. Making people smile is like crack to me, which is why I may start clowning.
So, my dear reader, let me learn you a little thing or two about cruise plumbing and why I refuse to ever shit on a cruise again and answer the question of where the poop go?
Cruises don't have a whole lot of water for plumbing. Desalination is energy intensive, and using fresh water as a poop chaser isn't exactly the best use of resources. All cruises rely on pressurized sewage systems, which cut back the amount of water by keeping the entire plumbing system under vacuum pressure. Each cruise has some number of pumps in the engine room that run to keep the manifold at a low enough pressure. When you flush the toilet, a thin membrane opens to let the higher pressure atmosphere + your poop rush down into the system to the poop muncher.
Well that just sounds like brown sunshines and yellow rainbows, until you consider the fact that the system REALLY needs to maintain proper pressure, and the configuration of the toilets makes it really easy for one person to fuck it all up for the rest of us. This isn't Japan: there is no guarantee that the poopoo train will run on time.
A misplaced ciggie, or tampon, or honest to god rock solid turd clogging the red circled areas could take down a single toilet, a whole bus of toilets, or the whole fucking system. These membranes / valves are also incredibly small, so it is exceedingly easy to clog the system. Not to mention that a tear in one of these membranes can prevent the system from fully and effectively reaching proper vacuum pressure which makes flushing impossible. So throwing razorblades down the toilet is also completely out of the question.
But all of this, all of this brain damage of clogs and depressurization, still wouldn't necessarily prevent me from shitting on a cruise again if it wasn't for the answer to the next question I asked to chief cruise engineer.
What preventative or non prevantative actions do you guys take to prevent this from happening, or fix it when it does happen?
Well, we just fix it as soon as it happens.
And I knew that was a lie. The entire women's bathroom by the library was down for three days, and might have been longer if we didn't disembark on the third day of shitmas.
Here is a photo or two from the cruise. feat the coolest dog in the world, my flesh prison, and the scientology boat
