Here we are in chapter 10! This week many bad things will happen and then a good thing will happen at the end! If you want to start at the beginning then click here.
Nothing but blue to see, and the smell of sea.
The next morning there were no students at the level two six A.M. class per usual. With the free time I took the opportunity to go to the top deck. As I gazed out at the horizon the French warship was no where to be seen. The Ottoman warship was missing as well. I went back down to the bridge to do the daily printing and to learn about the most recent gossip about the warships.
Nothing but smiles.
Uzgur was smiling as I entered the bridge, he was talkative and in a jocular mood. The warships had agreed that both of them would leave and for now no military action would be made against Osman. I finished my printing and showed him the list of students who hadn’t come yet. He promised to take the list to the captain who would talk to the students individually.
The following day the captain came back with news that some of the students were too far behind and they didn’t feel comfortable being in the class. With the new crew, I had noticed that there were a couple of students that were so far behind that the class was almost impossible for them, so I wasn’t surprised. They would end up getting laughed at and teased by their friends and one of them had told the radio man that he couldn’t understand anything, so he didn’t want to come anymore as well. I decided that I would make an extra class on Saturday since there were no classes then. I called it “Beginner catch up class” or in Ottoman: “Super cok beginner ders”. I put up posters along with the normal crew list with their class times. I came up with a creative idea, but I made one mistake. I added two confused looking people and then speech bubbles where I wrote common English mistakes that Ottoman students make. I.E.: “How old are you?” “Fine thanks and you?” “I am very money” etc. The only problem was that this enticed some people aboard the ship to add their own bubbles.
The daddies of the coop right?
One person added “I love cock” and put it right above the confused girl’s head. I decided to report it to the radioman and asked him if I should write a focus card. These were cards where anyone on the ship could report a safety hazard or complain about something. He laughed and said “No, let’s tell the captain.” The captain also laughed and said there was nothing we could do because there was no way to figure out who had done it. He said to write back “Come to the OIM’s office (the captain’s office) and you’ll find the biggest one”. Then the radioman started to talk about how one of the helicopter pilots from Cameron had a large cock too and the captain asked him how he knew.
I decided to do nothing, I thought that writing a response might get me more responses and they might write on future posters for more entertainment. Half a day later the message was still up and the talk of the ship. One of the head guys on the ship asked me to scratch it out, but I had a better idea. You know if you turn the second “C” in “cock” to an “O” it changes the word to cook? So that’s what I did. Then I added “ing” on the end. “I Love cooking” it said, which was a little bit sexist since it was above the girl’s head, but it was better than cock.
The mess hall was like a frat hall, even though most of the workers were 40 to 50 years old.
I assumed people on the ship might write on the posters at some point, as whenever I heard the foreigner’s conversations, they usually talked about three things: “Women, cocks and masturbating”. These of course were the western foreigners on the ship. I sat with them a few times and it was silent when I sat down, that was until someone brought up one of the three topics. Then they could talk for hours. I still figured if cocks and raunchy conversations were the worst thing about the ship, then everything would be ok.
In theatre the broken leg is a great thing, on an oil ship: not so much.
However, there were soon injuries in successive weeks. First a guy broke his leg on the stairs. There were constant reminders in safety meetings about holding onto the rail, and in those same meetings half the focus cards focused on people walking up and down the stairs, with a coffee in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Perhaps they were holding the handrail with their foot and hopping down. This man was apparently carrying laundry down the stops and missed the last two or three steps and crashed down, and cracked his ankle, with a minor fracture. He claimed he was holding the handrail when he fell but nobody believed him.
These fleshy sticks weren’t meant to go in a grinder
I thought that would be the end of it, that maybe everyone would be on edge and extra careful about safety, but I was wrong. The very next safety meeting there were two more injuries. One man twisted his wrist and had to be taken to Antalya for X-rays. He returned in under forty-eight hours and was working again though. Then there was a man who got his finger stuck somewhere it didn’t belong. He also went to Antalya, but he wasn’t so lucky. Part of his finger was amputated after his glove got stuck in some part of a machine and tugged his finger in after it. It made me glad that I was an English teacher.
Cranky tears, know no age.
That was until the new crew arrived. The classes went well and were pretty typical lessons, but one class came in and they were overly pushy. Immediately complaining about reviewing old content that half of them couldn’t do anyways. Demanding that the class be ended early because they were tired and more. I was happy to let them leave about five minutes early. I wondered if the last few weeks were just subsequent hell weeks. Then there was an announcement. “Do not use the elevator, maintenance is being done on it.” Well, I didn’t think anyone would be using it anyway since it hadn’t been working for almost two months.
Pretty close to how our elevator worked.
What I imagine the Scotsman on the radio looked like.
It wasn’t but a day later where the message “The elevator is working, I repeat the elevator is working” came across the PA system. A second PA announcement followed “WOOHOOOOOO”. Perhaps it was even more “O’s” than that. Something good had finally happened, and in relation to this week I had to say “it was about time.”