Cruising The Seven Seas: Colourful Casual

Colourful Casual

24^th September 2011

Usually when we are at sea, it’s a formal night. Today it’s a casual night or as the cruise compass put it “colourful casual”. The day was mainly used to sort out the guest's visas in preparation for Israel.

In the morning, I was on yet another table sale. It was a three hour table sale which was pretty dead until 30 minutes before I was supposed to box everything away and take it back down to the gallery. During my last hour, I was on a roll! I was impressed by my results while tilling up afterwards. I sold 6 cameras, two sets of AA batteries, one camera case and a tripod. Not bad!

There wasn’t really much to do for the rest of the day, except catch up on sleep and blog updates. I’m seriously behind on my blog entries, it’s terrible but nowadays we get a lot less time off than before, when Jomar was running things.

During the evening Zoran and I were both in the studio. Zoran got the short straw of shooting on the Pink (diamond) backdrop. So many people walk past commenting on how ugly the backdrop is – and they are right! I was on LSP again and as it’s a casual night it means I can kick my shoes off, walk around in my socks and hang my gallery jacket up on the pentab hook! Why? Because it's casual night and the guests have to kick off their shoes before walking onto the crisp white, LSP backdrop. If I'm not wearing my shoes, it makes it easier to convince people to take their shoes off.

Anyway, overall, the night was a royal boring one. We had nothing to do most of the time. After four hours, we hadn’t even taken a hundred images each. It was poor, but no one wanted their photo taken.

While in the studio I managed to sell a GTP plus prints to a French-Canadian family. As the place was a ghost ship, I took the family into the gallery and sorted out their GTP. Well, at least I’d reached my GTP target.

At the end of the night I told Reuben I’d sold a GTP from the studio. Selling on this cruise had been incredibly slow and we had hardly any GTP orders. Reuben already knew about the GTP sale. I thought he’d checked the sales stats. Well, he hadn’t.

One of my so-called “team” mates, Camila, had gone into Reuben and complained about me leaving my studio to sell a guest a GTP when she was working in the gallery and didn’t have anything to do. Erm, last time I checked there was no rule on whether I could sell a package from my studio and charge them in the gallery. If it's busy, of course I can't leave, but it wasn't. Did she think I was going to let her charge it in her name so she reaches her target?

I had to replay the events to Reuben. As there were no guests at my studio, or around the area, Reuben didn't mind me taking the guests into the gallery to charge them for the package. It was in the “best interest of the business” so it was fine.

I just couldn’t believe how narrow minded and stupid some people can be. Why put in a complaint about someone when you’re going to earn off it? OK, so the girl obviously doesn’t have “labia” or the gift of the gab, as we say in England, like she thinks she does, but don’t get upset when other people around you are much better at their job and selling. It’s pointless.

The atmosphere here is getting dragged down again with the constant problems. There’ll be another blow up soon. It’s just a matter of when.

Getting my schedule for tomorrow, I was going on tour in Ashdod. I’d never been on tour in Ashdod, but it was going to be a long day. 10 hour tours are killers!! Either way I was interested to see what was out there.

Going to the lab I dropped my camera bag off and headed up to the slop chest with Zoran. Getting my cards out my pocket my Crew Card wasn’t on my key ring. Shit! Where the hell had it gone? I started running around the ship looking for it and couldn’t find it anywhere.

Ringing Reuben I told him what had happened. His reply was to get up at 6am and start having another look around the ship. If I found it, I could go on the tour at 7am. If I didn’t I’d have to wait until at least 8am to get a new Crew Card, meaning I would miss my tour and be stuck on the ship until it was replaced. Trust me to lose my Crew Card the night before going on tour to a place I’d never been before. It’s sod’s law!!

Photos from tonight's very slow LSP session.