On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Phil Pugliese (via tml list)
<nobody@simplelists.com> wrote:
> This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (philpugliese@yahoo.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message follows:
>
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Wed, 6/18/14, Jeffrey Schwartz <schwartz.jeffrey@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>  Friend of mine works for Norwegian cruise lines as one of
>  the 2
>  network engineers on the ship. He's listed as the lowest
>  level officer
>  rating you can get, but officers get access to passenger
>  ameneties, so
>  he gets the same awesome food, pool , etc when off-shift.
>  He also has zero expenses for 10 months out of the year
>  (other 2
>  months ship is in refit) so it works pretty well.
>  -------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Any info wrt what the 'other ranks' get?
>
> I have this image of a movie I saw once where the Capt of an 18th century UK ship-of-the-line lived in a sumptous suite while the lot of the 'swabbies' was truly abysmal...
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

I guess this is Trav-ish, since it's life of a crew member on a ship...

Most of this is based on a conversation a few years ago, so some
errors may be present.

He and one other guy share a room with 2 small beds, 2 small closets.
He said the beds are smaller than twin sized. The closets are about
foot locker sized.

They both do network admin - all the point of sale terminals in the
ship plus all the passenger info computers used by stewards, plus
passenger use of Internet.
Nav and Engineering are on another network. Engineering handles that,
although they sometimes consult.

His life as he told me is he gets on the ship, and rides along for 5 months.
He works 12 on / 12 off with his cabin mate.
When they come into port, if there's nothing critical going on, they
toss a coin for who goes ashore.

He takes his off-shift meals in Passenger Mess, or if he's on-shift he
runs and grabs a sandwich from the crew galley.
Passenger Mess is _really_ good. Sometimes he's expected to 'host' a
table, and be in uniform doing the polite crew guy etc during the
meal, which he thinks is work and the company doesn't.

He can use the pool, and visit the casino and such. He can join in on
the skeet shooting, but has to pay like the passengers do (ammo and
clays cost is not included in his pay) and he's at the back of the
line.
He turns his uniforms in to the laundry, they do them and return them
to his cabin, which I think is a nice perk.
He mentioned enjoying sitting on deck and reading during off-shift.

After 5 months of cruising, he gets a month off, and then shifts to a
_different_ ship in the same line while the other ship goes through
refurb and refit.

Pay is decent - about 70% of a normal network admin's pay, but no
housing, food, clothing costs. He does pay for a storage unit 'back
home' that has clothes, his car, etc. During his months off, he
usually stays with family or gets a long-term hotel.