The interior is rather plain with the exception of a few painted scenes of the typical Hawaiian images of tikis and surfboards. The dining room is divided into stations, most of which contain a server station where we store a cleaning bucket, trays, and bus tubs. There are usually three employees in each section, and we all amble about our confined areas slowly to kill as much time as possible. I take my time scrubbing the tables by the window so I can scan the waters for breaching humpback whales.
The guests often seem stuck in a trance as they examine their choices. I must maneuver around them because they don't see me; they focus solely on the food. They are not like hunters who are hyper aware of their surroundings. Instead, they resemble zombies bumbling toward convienent nourishment.
My job is to remove the dirty plates and ready the table for the next person to sit down for his feast. Breakfast can be chaotic because the cruisers want to fill up and then get off the ship. Lunch is often deserted because most reasonable people would rather spend time snorkeling with sea turtles than observing large families and extra large people stuff themselves.
Recently I was assigned the role of beverage maintenance. I push a cart stacked with racks of cheap glasses and German coffee cups, and I replenish the stations. When the juices run low, I grab a carton from the fridge and top it off. The giant coffee makers and espresso machines unload their grounds into a bucket below the counter. I haul that into the kitchen and dump it into a designated container.
Everything must be separated and deposited into the correct bins because we recycle everything we use on the ship. It is illegal to do otherwise as certain environmental regulations must be followed. The paper goes in the yellow bin, plastic in the blue, glass in the red. Food scraps get dumped into a channel in the dish pit. All the wasted pizza crusts are pulverized into fish food and dumped into the ocean. The water turns a murky brown, and the fish begin their feast.
The seafood you eat could have eaten what you threw away, but this is the essence of recycling. It is not meant to sound disgusting, although undoubtedly many will be sickened to know this happens. Fish that feed off of table scraps are not as gross as cardboard-like ice cream cones that were manufactured rather than baked, but people eat those, too.
Many of these ice cream cone loving people, in fact, take cruises, and they leave messes on tables, which I transport to the galley, where the dishwashers convert half-eaten burgers into brown flakes that alter an ecosystem. When you consider all this mess, I'm baffled by the concept of fine dining.
After my shift in the buffet, I stuff my face in the crew mess as I prepare for my evening shift in Skyline, a quasi-fine dining restaurant with a casual dress code. With my pressed shirt and tie, I serve the same cruisers I did in the buffet, but now I have to concern myself with the fork on the left and the knife on the right with the blades pointed in a certain direction. Why should we worry about all this orderly pretentiousness?Whatever food we don't eat, the animals will, and they don't give a damn about the silverware.
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