Chapter 11 has arrived! This week I will be invited to check out the engine room of the ship. If you haven’t read the other chapters and wish to start at the beginning of the story then, click here.
One of the PSVs (Public supply vessels) that would frequently visit Osman.
One of the biggest challenges on the ship wasn’t getting shipments on time, keeping the correct amount of sludge in the pipes or even keeping the ship afloat but it was something much simpler. Something that most people would never be able to imagine: trash segregation. There was a lot of trash on the ship, and there were many systems that had to be paid attention to. The cans had labels in Osman and in English and they even had a different color based on which kind of trash they were. Yet, there was still a huge problem when it came to getting people to put things in the right can.
Here are some examples of segregated trash. We had a lot more bins though.
There was general waste, plastic waste, paper waste, and metal waste; there were also special bins for razor blades, and aerosol cans. The kitchen could throw disposable food off the ship, but the rest was kept in these bins. Sometimes the trash didn’t even make it to the bins though. One day after a weekly safety meeting, about 10 steps from a general waste bin there was a banana peel sitting on an arm chair. Of course, in the next safety meeting a picture of the infamous peel was shown and trash segregation was mentioned once again.
The ship sits still, but the gossip travels fast. This is the top deck of Osman. We had a barbecue up there.
Sometimes the trash in the cans wasn’t the only trash on the ship though. That would be the words and gossip that came out of peoples’ mouths. There was good gossip and there was bad gossip, but no matter what kind of gossip it was, it made it around the ship faster than a speeding bullet. One morning I told a student about minimum wage in Alaska and by the last evening class at seven PM, another student was asking me about it. When I went to the break room after my final class that day, a food worker there also commented about the minimum wage salary in Alaska. The gossip wasn’t always good though. The gossip could be at its worst during the mealtimes in the mess hall.
A photo of race segregation in high school. The ship also had cultural/national segregation.
There were segregated groups that grouped together. They didn’t get together intentionally, but it happened naturally based on race or nationality. I tried to bounce around and when I did, I ran into more and more gossip. One day I sat at a table with Scottish, Canadian, American, Australian and south African workers. “Did ya hear about that damn safety man Steffen”, one asked the other. “No, what’s it?” responded the other. “He used to be a welder before he got into safety. Guess he couldn’t hack it.” There was a bit of a “macho” mentality on the ship, nobody wanted to show any weakness. Hard men, with stone mouths with as many tattoos as possible but they gossiped like little girls on a school yard. I tried my best to sit with them but there wasn’t much to talk about.
The attitude of many on the ship.
They were set into their routine of trying to act manly, so the only times they opened their mouths were to talk about women, sex or gossip. Eventually I returned to the Osman and Uzbek table. It was better to not know what they were saying, then to hear all the vile talk that I could understand. Sometimes I could still hear the gossip from afar though. When they were bored of gossiping about their fellow workers, they would scan the room and analyze different eating habits. “Look at that fuck, he only eats three portions every day and always cleans his plate,” said one. “He eats like my 15 year old daughter.” Said another. “Look how he slurps his soup, he looks like a camel. Just put it in your mouth sissy fuck it’s not that hot.”
A few of my students.
One day at the Osman table a man came up to me. “I heard you’re writing a book,” was his opening. The word got around the ship fast. I didn’t see myself as the Shakespeare of writing books or even close to being well known, yet they were still excited. “A lot of people think of the drilling and things on top deck as the most important, but the engine room is where everything else happens,” he continued. “Without the engines, the ship would die.” He was very serious about the engine room. He talked to me for the entire lunch about the engine room and even invited me to visit him. He wanted to show me all the engines and machines that were there.
PPE = gear a doctor might wear during Covid19.
It was going to be my first time going out of the accommodation area, so I needed special equipment just to go. I had to get boots, gloves, coveralls, a hat and goggles. The ship was split into two sections: the accommodation area and the working area. The accommodation area was where the mess hall, gym, living quarters, cinema room and English training room were located. The working area was the rest of the ship and took up about sixty to seventy percent of the total length of it. After a week of planning with him and getting the equipment from the ship’s store man I was finally ready. I entered the side locker on the way to the work area and the floor where the mess hall was. I didn’t see him. Every floor had different areas like this where there were changing rooms in between the two sections of the ship. These side pockets also had showers and lockers for the three hundred workers on board. I kept seeing people coming and going, they said hello and disappeared as fast as they came. I waited for ten minutes and then asked the next person who came into the locker “Where’s Ferhat”? He looked Osman, so I thought he would know.
Directions: they are everywhere.
The man knew English and told me how to get to the engine room: “Go outside, walk sixty meters, take a right, walk up the stairs and go inside”. They weren’t the best directions I had ever been given. I walked outside and there was the sea waiting for me. The walkway was about 2 meters wide. I walked along it but wasn’t sure how far sixty meters was. Soon I ran into another worker and asked him about the engine room, so he was kind enough to lead me there. Inside there was still no sign of the missing Osman. There was a bald man sitting looking at a screen, an Osman guy wandering about about and two old Croatians sitting at a table. I asked them where Ferhat was and they said he would be there shortly, and I could make myself some coffee. “I’m going to need half an Osman lira for it though,” one of them joked. I sat down at the table with the Croats and made small talk for a bit. Then another Osman student Murat came and sat down. He was a rough looking guy from Adana and had a huge Mustache the size of Texas. He joked and chatted with us as well. Finally, after about half an hour, Ferhat arrived. He also sat down, and we continued to drink tea and coffee for almost an hour before we got started. We put on our helmets and began our aquatic safari.
An engine room on a ship. The one on Osman, looked pretty similar.
There were doors with handles and doors that slide open with a button; like a door in a Sci-fi movie, or maybe a US prison. In the first room there were dozens of machines and engines. The sound was loud even with ear plugs in and ear muffs on. We went from room to room and he checked engine after engine. He told me the whole tour would take forty-five minutes and he had to do this route each shift. He wrote things down and checked more engines. Different engines did different things, and some of them had backups, just in case the main ones stopped working. I can’t remember what all the machines did but some of them included supplying the ship with hot water, storing all the shit and urine and mixing it into sludge that could be released into the sea.
What an engine workers life was probably like.
There were also engines that powered propellers, kept the ship cool or warm, distilled water and many other things. I asked questions about the engines and Ferhat knew all the answers. I couldn’t imagine a job like this, twelve hours a day, checking the engines three to four times each shift and then making sure nothing was wrong. Yet, without it being done, perhaps the ship would be in trouble. He joked that he didn’t need to go to the gym, because of the number of stairs he had to go up and down each day and the heavy pipes and other materials he might need to lift. He was in better shape than me, and I went to the gym every day while I was living on the ship.
Freedom!
After almost an hour of walking through room after room and yelling to be heard above the engines and make it past the earplugs we called it a day. I went back through a side door and came out on the bottom level of the ship. At first, I had no idea where I was, but then I saw the laundry room as well as the stairs and the elevator, so I was on the lowest level of the ship. I was excited to see all the engines but also relieved that it was over. I had gotten to see the heart of the ship and Ferhat had been right, without the engine room the ship would die, or be a very miserable place.