I recently did a contract for a prestigious cruise line so I really thought I'd have a lot more to rant about but surprisingly I don't?? It still ended up being a long post so sorry about that!
First up something I wish passengers would understand: If the captain makes an announcement over the tannoy such as a real incident or to instructions for a crew drill, please do the decent thing and DON'T TALK TO CREW UNTIL THE CAPTAIN'S FINISHED THE ANNOUNCEMENT. For example during a transatlantic crossing the captain decided we were doing a drill based around a suspicious package that exploded and the amount of people that kept coming up to me asking if the captain was for real and were asking me stuff about the drill over the instructions omf in the end I actually had to go and double-check with another crew member that I'd heard the crew instructions right.
The lazy passenger: Every morning on port days we'd help the deck stewards fold towels - we'd have these massive bins full of 100 and something towels and we can easily fold 1,500 towels in a day. It'd be pretty obvious they were clean (because why would you fold dirty towels) and sometimes people were so lazy they'd dump their dirty towels on top of the clean towels. Like why. Are you really telling me you're too lazy to sidestep 2 feet to the left to where the dirty towel bin is. Sometimes they'd make eye contact with you and grin so they knew damn well what they were doing. Like can you not. For hygiene reasons I now have to pull out every towel that your dirty towel has touched and put it back in the wash. Sometimes there'll be 3 of these bins you have to do alone and sometimes we can't put out clean towels fast enough so people being lazy shits slows down the process a lot.
The pedantic passenger: I had one man come up and ask for some towels which is fine, people often do ask us to pass them towels since when we're folding we often have our bins in front of where we store clean towels because it means we don't have to move around so much. I went to give him some folded towels since they were closer but this guy was adamant he wanted rolled towels - like why there's no difference. He then came back to get more towels and took from the folded towel pile. He wasn't rude, he was actually very polite when he asked and made his preference known but how pedantic he was over it really bugged me.
The woman who thought I was her bitch: On cruise ships the lifeguard work area is literally just the pool. Unlike lifeguards on land, we don't go near the toilets/changing rooms, Housekeeping staff take care of cleaning and checking stuff in the toilets/changing rooms that and it's obvious enough. The disabled shower seat in the woman's changing rooms was broken and the shower pressure was low so this woman comes up and reports it to me which is fine. I told her I was going to pass it on since it's not something I can fix myself and she was fine with that. On the sister cruise line we have to report maintenance faults to the deck stewards or the line manager, whoever's closer. I didn't know the procedure for reporting faults on this cruise line and made the mistake of assuming it'd be a similar but the deck stewards won't do anything so you have to report it yourself. Which is fine but it'd be nice if they'd been honest and told me I'd have to report it myself or that they were too busy to deal with the fault instead of saying they'd sort it. I didn't know this at the time so I told the deck stewards who said they'd deal with the faults and I went on with my day. The next day this woman finds the faults haven't been fixed, literally drags me into the changing room with the faults screams in my face and was borderline abusive about how I'm ruining her holiday because I didn't fix the fault. This is all in front of her 95 year old mother who's holiday I was apparently ruining as well but the poor lady was clearly terrified of this woman screaming and being so aggressive. This woman really thought I'd pull out a monkey wrench and fix the faults there and then whilst she supervised it and got more and more pissy when that didn't happen. I kept telling her I'm not trained in maintenance/plumbing so all I could do was pass it on but she was adamant that I had to be the one to fix it and it had to be fixed within so many hours or she'd report me. She also demanded that the hotel manager had to phone her cabin to tell her the faults were fixed - bitch do you really think he's going to have time to do that??? I told the managers on my team later to cover my arse in case maintenance hadn't fixed those faults within this woman's deadline and they just laughed (at the woman) and said not to worry about it she was being an entitled bitch and if she did report me they'd ignore it. After that issue was fixed, she kept coming to me with various faults like fuck off and let me lifeguard. The real joke was with the first incident she said she was going to reception to make sure it'd been reported like why you know reception has a direct line to maintenance so you may as well just report it yourself you're clearly being an entitled bitch and making sure the crew will run round after you. :U
The entitled cruiser: This woman had a tantrum because I asked her son who was a minor to leave the adult only pool. She kept going on about how I should look around and ask other kids to leave but the pool was empty after that and her son was literally the only kid that'd tried to get in it?? She also started lecturing me on manners and how I should learn to be more polite - I spoke to several colleagues later to make sure I hadn't been rude without realizing since I can be a bit oblivious to my tone of voice and I sometimes come off as short without meaning to. They all said I couldn't of been more polite and she was kicking off because she thought she could go anywhere she pleased just because she could afford to go on that cruise line and didn't like that someone had said otherwise.