Big staff changeover

Today marks the start of what I expect to be the busiest month of my contract.  Due to an unfortunate alignment of several production staff contracts, more than half of our 15 staff (8 of them) have left or will leave by Feb. 23.  This includes both of the other Studio B stage staff, the Studio B production manager, and the Studio B sound technician, in addition to several people from the theatre.  Both of the incoming stage staff in Studio B are new hires so I expect it to be busy for me, being the only person with all the know-how of how we operate.  Today we're in St. Thomas and those two studio B stage staff have supposedly already signed-on to the ship, which is lucky for us I suppose because we were only expecting one to come onboard today.   This means Leslie the current stage staff who is leaving in February, will be able to train his replacement before leaving.  That should make things a little easier on me.

Our first cruise after dry-dock went exceptionally well in my opinion.  Dry-dock is a big job and gets everyone out of their usual routine and instead doing work that is often more physically demanding and exhausting.  Given that scenario, it's easy to expect that the first cruise after dry-dock might not go so smoothly if the crew are all tired out and maybe not up to their usual standard.  Our crew ranked very high in guest satisfaction in 2009 though so I suspect that had to do with the first post dry-dock cruise going smoothly.  If you have a great team to start with, they will usually still come across at least as a "good" team when they're worn out.

I also found out this week that my contract may not be as long as I was expecting.  My original contract had a projected sign-off date of April 24, 2010 but since my replacement is coming on April 10 (and he has worked in B on Explorer before), I will probably sign off on that day.  Great news for me... except that it really puts the pressure on to get my lighting experience in a shorter period of time if I still hope to be promoted to lighting tech.

Well, that's about all for today.  I need to get out and enjoy sunny St. Thomas (after 6 exhausting sea days).