Its Raining Gastric Distress!

Schwelp. Tomorrow I'm moving into a bigger room. It has a DESK and a COUCH and TWO, yes, TWO closets! This room, which is still significantly smaller than my bedroom back home, is akin to the Taj Mahal on this ship. You can stand up and walk 3 steps WITHOUT reaching the other side! It's almost too much.

Now that my fellow trumpet player isn't also the musical director (md from now on), more trumpeting responsibilities have been laid on me. I was recently yelled at by the md for not yet not knowing the 1st trumpet's solo in one of the production shows. He was quite visibly angry at me because the new lead trumpeter was having trouble with this plungery, growly solo. I calmly agreed that yes I would learn the solo, while wondering to myself why he was so angry about something that I had not yet not done.
Another new responsibility I have is to play the Jazz Caberet concert once a week. This concert has 21 songs back to back with no breaks and there are only two horns; me and the md on tenor sax. I played it for the first time this week and was pathetically nervous having to basically sight read the whole show while standing next to my short-fused boss. To say the least I made a couple of mistakes, which anyone would do sight reading that much music while that nervous. However, seeing as my boss wants everyone to always know that he is exactly that, THE BOSS, he called me to his cabin after the show to growl in my face and give me a P.O.L. No, I have no idea what that stands for, but it is the equivalent of a written down verbal warning. Getting one has exactly zero disciplinary consequences, so the only purpose it can possibly serve is to remind me that I need to practice (which I certainly was going to do anyway) and that my boss is in fact my boss, which I was somewhat aware of before. I suppose its too much to ask for to have a polite conversation instead...
All I can say is that it is unfortunate that those who are attracted to positions of power are often exactly the ones who will abuse it.

In other news, by which I mean the actual tv and internet news, Royal Caribbean is in trouble because of how much disease is going around its fleet. Specifically, its my ship The Voyager of the Seas that is causing all the trouble. Last week we had over 200 cases of GI and this week we still have about 26, with a few new cases coming up every day. This means that yet again, we have to sanitize the entire ship from top to bottom when we get to New Orleans tomorrow. Every hour or so an announcement comes over the PA system of an audibly exasperated person reminding us to please, please wash our hands continually. Normally, once we go 72 hours with no new cases reported, it would mean we don't have to continue the barrier cleanings, but now that there is all this publicity about it, this practice may have to continue for longer as well as maybe some new, even more fun routines. I can't wait to find out.