It seems the cruise ship myself and my family have been on TWICE has had a little problem. Having 600 people shitting uncontrollably and throwing up must be a really pleasant experience. Why don’t these cruise ship companies ever learn? Are they so consumed by generating quarterly profits in order to enrich the CEO and other executives with their stock options, that they are willing to risk the health of their passengers?
Evidently so. These greedy bastards run a 10 day cruise and have the boat unload thousands of people in the morning and turn around and depart by the afternoon with thousands of new passengers. Maybe they could wait one day and thoroughly clean and disinfect the ship before allowing new guests on board. Of course, that would cut Earnings Per Share by 2 cents. Now the bad publicity and payoffs to those sickened will cost them 20 cents per share. Brilliant corporate strategy.
Guess who won’t be going on this cruise ship for a third time?
At least it wasn’t a Three Hour Cruise. Sometimes they never come back.
No cruises for me.
They are floating petri dishes.
Disgusting.
I had an encounter with a norovirus once. It hit me, then my wife, then my son. We had a shitty weekend and I missed a bike ride I had been training for called the Tour de Blast. Instead of doing a challenging ride with lots of climbing on the road to Mt. St. Helens, I stayed home and had my own personal tour de blast.
Thank goodness for acidified sodium chlorite, I will not travel without it. From brushing my teeth, purifying water, cleansing cuts and fighting impromptu infectious disease, I would feel exposed and unprepared without it.
I’m sorry for the suffering these folks experienced.
I’m secretly (not anymore) happy as it makes me look more reasonable about my refusal to want to go on a cruise.
These viral diarrheal illness spread like wildfire in the closed confines of a cruise ship. For so many to be affected so quickly, it likely came from an infected food service worker (usually a Third Worlder on many of these ships) who did not wash his/her hands before making up 1000 gallons of creme fresh.
Once a few passengers get infected, the virus spreads all over the surfaces of the ship, where more and more passengers come in contact with it.
It is more than an exponential expansion, more like geometric.
It likely has very little to do with the sanitation system of the ship, sorry, but you can’t blame this one on the profit motive.
Paying 3rd worlders slave wages and not training them in the basics of cleanliness is due to the profit motive. Just like not doing proper maintenance on the engines and the sewage system.
So solly, this is due to the greed of corporate executives and their quarterly EPS goals.
If you’ve ever been on one of these cruises, the only reason people go is to eat, and most are morbidly obese. They run your ass over on their rascals trying to get to the buffet line ahead of you, because you might grab the last pastry before a restock. It’s disgusting gluttony. Introducing dysentery is God’s way of telling these fat fucks to quit eating and lose weight.
Last cruise was from Perth to Singapore in 2012. As we waited to board they were unloading stretcher cases one after another from a trip that appeared to have been a touch rough. Best cure for sea sickness is a gin and tonic but martinies also do the trick. The QM2 has a bar called the Martini bar…how great is that?
Dysentery, huh? I’d never go on a cruise. Unless it got cheap enough. Then I would. Old Country Buffet on the high seas. What’s not to like?
1) You take a nice big shit.
2) You wipe your ass.
3) You stand up, turn around, and admire your work.
4. You flush the toilet.
What is wrong with that scenario, and why?
I’ll wait for your answer.
I can’t help feeling like the pace of things is such that we aren’t so much “consumers” as herds of sheep to be processed, schorn of all value, and sent out to pasture in a manner as efficently as possible by our masters. Not just entertainment, but all services seem to be trending in this manner.
Went on one when I was in middle school with Dad and Step mom. It was kind of neat, but a nice quiet beach is infinitely better.
No fucking chance I’d ever go on a cruise! All I can picture is every person I’ve ever seen on PoWM locked up together on a ship. I don’t think you can wash that off! FUCK THAT! I hate crowds anyway.
I_S
Oh, yeah. Paradise. Trapped on a ship with a week with 1000 strangers gorging themselves, getting drunk and showing off their flabby butts and tattooed necks. I think I will pass.
Admin – go ahead, blame the ship owners. Everyone knows they pack 6000 people into floating death traps where if anything happens the captain and all of the crew will abandon ship and leave the passengers to fend for themselves. Everyone know that these are just giant incubation chambers for disease. Everyone knows that the ships will be packed with low-paid third-world employees and that their felow passengers will, largely, be, as IS says, PoWM. Everyone knows the captain will be too busy trying to bang the passengers to actually captain the vessel. If he runs the ship aground, he will dive head first into the first lifeboat. Everyone knows that people on these “cruises” die, are killed, or “go overboard”, and no investigation is done.
Everyone knows. Or should. The info is readily available. But still people get on these floating death-traps by the thousands.
It is a service provided at a price, to customers willing to pay the (very) low price, without doing due diligence.
Are the owners unethical? Surely. Could they raise prices and provide a better service? No way – they rely on PoWM for much of their custom, and raising prices would put them out of business. So either you get a disease riddled whore of an organization, or no whore at all, as these folks cannot afford a $3000 a night call-girl.
It is similar to going out drinking: Do you go out to Harry’s Bar and pay $30 for a beer, or do you go wher you can get a $2 beer? For $30 you will be safe and coddled. For $2 you will be at risk.
I will NEVER go on one of those floating funeral barges. Fuck that.
Southern Sage is not as dumb as I thought he was. I am impressed.
What happened on this boat was probably caused by a single worker not washing his or her hands. Just look how quickly everyone became sick.
Imagine what it will look like if the grid goes down and we lose basic sanitation. Crapping all the useful fluids out of your body when there is no clean water around will bring death fairly quickly. It is how it will go down here.
Nickelthrower – It could be caused by any number of things – a passenger coughing at the salad bar, for instance.
Re the water issue, get a good filter and a few big bags of chlorine.
The ships are built to high standards and are regularly inspected. The food is probably fine (unless it comes from China). You can not however inspect low paid third world workers and therein lies the problem. They probably come from one of those countries that don’t use toilet paper.
Here is the answer to what’s missing in the question you pussies would not answer;
1) You take a nice big shit.
2) You wipe your ass.
3) You stand up, turn around, and admire your work.
3A) CLOSE THE TOILET LID !!!!!!!!!!!
4. You flush the toilet.
Nasty shitty fecal bacteria sprays a few feet from an unclosed lid. Settles all over nearby stuff. I pity you people who keep your toothbrushes near the toilet. You might reconsider why you have bad breath. Those bacteria float in the air …. and through the ship’s ventilation system. So, a few hundred (thousand?) people shit without closing the lid and ……….. voila’, people get sick.
Stucky, if you use charmin, I bet you have frequent toilet overflows.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=VUSd_RYnxAY
I went on a cruise to Bermuda a year and a half ago. It made me sick to my stomach, too, and that was without the norovirus.
I hate cruises. I would rather be miserable on a small sailboat fighting heavy seas to Bermuda for 8 days (BTDT) than spend 3 days on a cruise ship surrounded by a bunch of douchers.
First, they treat you like a big, dumb child. Everything is dumbed down so you feel like you’re on a giant floating adult Romper Room.
Then, they the people on the ship act like they’re big, dumb children in a floating Romper Room.
Also, the entire experience on the ship seems to be about extracting every last penny from you possible.
The people on the ship acted like utter morons. There’s nothing like going to a meal in a restaurant and getting to stand next to a big, sweaty dude in one of those shirts with the sleeves torn off with the sides of the shirt gaping open. Or when you’re in line in the restaurant and you know it is, like, an endless supply of food at multiple serving stations-you can get anything you want and it never runs out-and you watch people act like total gluttons, as if the food could run out at any moment. I watched people pile their trays high and stuff their faces as fast as they could while still standing in line for the next station.
I felt bad meeting the crew members who are all from the 3rd world or Eastern Europe and have to cater to all these fat, lazy, entitled Americans.
Cruises suck.
Oh, BTW-if you want to know how the norovirus gets around, look no farther than the crew. My brother was on the ship with me and caught the cooks/food servers picking their noses.
Oh, and ask the crew about cleaning the pool-when they drain the pool (must be done frequently), they pull massive wads of pubes, chest, and head hair all mixed up with nasty CopperTone smegma. I don’t even want to think about what’s going on in the hot tub… I waited for the beach.
gilberts, I like your attitude. Post more often.
Been on 7 cruises …. 4 in the Caribbean, 1 in the eastern Med, 1 up the east coast and on down the St. Lawrence to Montreal, Canada, and 1 up the Danube from Budapest to Nuremberg. Enjoyed every one of them. My wife and I never had a health issue, including any form of sea sickness. Met lots of very nice people from many different countries. Still in contact with a phys ed teacher from Michigan I met 12 years ago in Venezuela. Wish I had stayed in contact with the Jewish rabbi from Toronto who had a Catholic girlfriend from Quebec. They were a hoot.
Guess it’s all in the eye of the beholder.
Oh, I think I do-I used to live in an apartment in college with 3 other people. One of them was this fatass chick who was bigger than I was (6’2″ 230lbs). She looked like one of the hippos from Fantasia. She was nice, but she stank like shit. She had this nasty odor like rotten cheese and freshly-turned soil that just followed her. It was awful to be around. It was worst right after she showered. That moist, hot funky Haiti in August stench just fogged the bathroom.
Being an asshole, and braver than my buddy in the other suite, it fell to me to break the news to her that she smelled.
Have you ever tried to break that news to someone in a nice way? There’s no nice way to tell someone they stink-only degrees of embarrassment.
I know why she stank, too-she must have been so damn fat, she couldn’t reach all the crevices and caverns she was carrying.
The last days of the year, her folks came to help her move out. They were fatasses and smelled awful, too. It was just awful. After she left, I emptied an entire can of potpourri into her room and locked the door shut. Awful.
SSS, thumbs down for yall for being such a pollyanna.
Forgot to mention cruise #8 to Alaska, coming up to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. Will go out of Seattle or Vancouver. Hopefully, it will go as well as the first 7 cruises and won’t include too much salmon. Not that I don’t like salmon, but a little bit of that shit goes a long way.
“SSS, thumbs down for yall for being such a pollyanna.”
—-Zara
“The game consists of finding something to be glad about in every situation.”
—-definition of Pollyanna
Guilty. Otherwise, I’d have blown my brains out by now.
Zarathustra says:
“SSS, thumbs down for yall for being such a pollyanna.”
Z-man, shouldn’t that be, ‘to you all’ or ‘you alls’ or ‘y’all’ or even ‘youse’? wtf is yall?
nothing more irritating than a fake accent. my boss was stationed in England and 30 years later he still referred to the bar as a ‘pub’.
then again, the guy was a walking contradiction. to describe him would take a couple of paragraphs and I don’t like writing that much about one person.
EC, you are clearly not from teh south. We don’t say y’all down heah. We say yall. It is pronounced as a single syllable and thus is phonetically expressed as such.
Fuckin yankees.
EC is from el paso, oh yeah that’s yankee alright. I wonder why our teachers taught us songs like Dixieland and spoke with a southern accent, a real one.
You are a poser. and a wanna be Zorro Austrian. You are undoubtedly a great engineer and probably still a virgin. Am I lying? Huh, how’s that fake accent working out with the southern cock?
If you really are a southerner now, you will have no trouble admitting you like ‘cock’.
Z getting his freak on:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3enC9Z18KKE
If you wanna Cruise, why get on a Floating Disease Factory with Fat People?
Back in my years as a Clinical Chemist, me, a Kiwi Intern and 2 Nurses leased a Yacht in the Greek Islands and sailed it around for 2 weeks for $500 apiece. You can still do this, though not quite so cheap anymore. If you don’t know jack about sailing, you can hire a Captain and Crew pretty cheap too!
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“You choose your yacht from our bareboat list and we provide the crew to accompany you. Whether you need a professional skipper, cook, hostess, steward or just a deck-hand, all can be provided for the duration of your charter for a set fee. As the charterer, you would be responsible for covering all the costs of the charter (fuel, port fees, water, meals, etc.) and you would need to also provide a cabin or berth for your crew and their meals.
This is an informal set up with everyone living and working together for the week. The advantage of this kind of holiday is that you get to choose your own sailing yacht, fix your own itinerary and basically decide exactly how / where you would like to sail. To a certain degree, you can also choose a skipper who you feel would be most compatible with your group. Let us know your preferred dates, destinations, crew number or size / type of yacht, and we will find you one of our best and highly qualified sailing skippers to take you where you want to go.”
Here’s a nice one for up to around 8 people on an Ocean star 56′
http://www.odysseysailing.gr/yachts/crewed_sailing_yachts/velos.html
Captain Ron will take good care of you!
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RE
you got me Z-man, after that Yankee comment I had nothing, mere struggling in quicksand. I had expected a frontal assault, Robert E. Lee would be proud of yall.
I’m getting sick just reading gilberts’ comments.
Yours too, AWD.
I felt like I was on a floating prison. Never again.
I do not understand people that choose a cruise with a big ship for their vacation.
There are many options there to discover amazing places and have a great time.
“Imagine the perfect holidays at summer time. Usually in a scenario like this our mind goes to sandy beaches, cocktails, games at sea and luxury hotels. But thinking of this picture we are realizing that all these seem to be just like our last holiday time or those they seem a little bit boring or very predictable”
Charter a boat from a reliable company that will offer you the time of your life. The Greek islands are a dreamy destination for every summer visitor. Sailing the Greek islands ensures that you will be able to visit many of them in a relatively short time (a week).
The advantage of this kind of holiday is that you get to choose your own sailing yacht, fix your own itinerary and basically decide exactly how / where you would like to sail at low cost
Check out
for more info.
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