SHIP SHAPE!!
Mary Ellen and I just returned from a wonderful Caribbean cruise. But no one wants to read a humor column about how much fun we had. So instead, I’ll put on my grumpy old man hat and describe everything that went wrong.
On our first day, we went snorkeling. It took us about an hour on a catamaran to reach the reef, but the fish in Saint Thomas must have seen us coming, because by the time we put on all of our gear and dove into the bay, there was nary a minnow in sight.
The guide tried to paint a rosy picture of our pricey excursion. “Have you ever seen so many fish?” he asked.
I answered honestly: “Yes, on the wall of Red Lobster.”
Later, on board the ship, one of my hearing aids stopped working.
“Which one?” asked Mary Ellen.
“Starboard side,” I said.
My wife was impressed that I had adopted the proper nautical terminology. But when I turned around to walk toward the lunch buffet, my broken hearing aid was now on the port side of my head. This created a real problem: Mary Ellen never knew which ear to yell into.
Getting on the elevator required us to scan our room card. I kept swiping but the elevator door didn’t open. A fellow passenger walked by. “You’re scanning the hand sanitizer dispenser,” he told me.
I complained to the front desk that both pools on the ship lacked a shallow end. They were five feet nine inches deep everywhere, an inch over the top of my head. Who designed these pools? Retired NBA players? “Am I the only person to complain about this?” I asked the cruise director.
“No, Mr. Wolfsie, but you are the tallest.”
One night I carried the TV remote onto the veranda outside our room that overlooked the ocean. The device slipped out of my hand when the ship rocked and it landed in the Atlantic.
“That’s never happened before,” said the steward. “What were you doing when you dropped it?”
“I was channel surfing,” I told him.
Our room safe required us to choose a security code. I used our old house number. But I must have entered it incorrectly when I programmed it, because I could not unlock it with those same digits later that night. Panicked, I called the security desk. “How did I get locked out of my own safe?”
“Wait a second, aren’t you the guy who griped about the snorkeling, swiped the hand sanitizer with his key card, complained that the pool has no shallow end, and lost his remote in the Atlantic? And did you ever get your hearing aid fixed?”
Wow, word travels fast at sea.
On the way home, I went to the deli at the airport to get a bite to eat before boarding the plane. All they had was a stale-looking chicken sandwich with wilted lettuce and slimy American cheese. I bought one along with a bottle of water. Mary Ellen took a pass.
“That will be $25.00,” said the cashier.
“$25.00? At Costco right here in San Juan, I could get five whole rotisserie chickens for 25.00!”
“Good luck fitting them under your seat, sir.”
Again, despite what you have read, I had a wonderful time. I especially liked our last glorious day in Puerto Rico. As David Letterman would have said: “It was 75 and sunny. Just like me.”
Dick Wolfsie spent his career sharing his humor, stories and video essays on television, radio and in newspapers. His columns appear weekly in The Paper of Montgomery County. E-mail Dick at Wolfsie@ aol.com