March 21, 2022
At Sea
I like to participate in the Knitters and Natters get-togethers on days when we are at sea. It’s fun to see what others are making, and fun to chat with friendly women. I will even wake up early, just so I don’t miss out.
Today I got there early because I wanted to make sure I had good light for my sashiko project. Pretty soon, another woman showed up. She was from NC and she was a non-stop talker. She told me she and her husband owned 10 houses. Some of them were rentals and some of them were purchased in order to flip. She then told me that they had some under contract and they did private financing because a lot of their buyers couldn’t get mortgages. She then said she and her husband were getting 12% on the private financing. Gasp.
Ms. Usury said several other things that really put me off, and the fact that she totally dominated the conversation didn’t help. And some of the other ladies were almost as bad. I left early, and I won’t be going back.
Ken and I went up to the top of the ship, where there is a little jogging track. Seven times around = 1 mile. It was a busy place. There was a pickleball court in the center, and a couple of young men were practicing TaeBo. It was interesting to watch. Ninety-five percent of the walkers walked counterclockwise and five percent walked clockwise. Why is that?
We decided to order lunch from room service. That turned into another one of those things that turned ought to be much harder than it needed to be. You were supposed to be able to order it using the interactive TV, which is part of the whole Medallion thing. It was very difficult and very slow to navigate through all the layers of menus.There is no paper menu, so it takes forever to look at all the options on the TV using only 4 arrows to navigate. When we finally finished putting together our whole order we tried to check out. I found out I had accidentally ordered 2 sandwiches, but I couldn’t figure out how to edit the order. I tried several things. We finally decided to submit the erroneous order and we would call room service and tell them to cancel one of the sandwiches. This had already taken at least 30 minutes.
I called Room Service and cancelled the extra sandwich. However, it soon became apparent that they had never received our order from the TV/Medallion system, so I had to give them the whole order over the phone. Then he said it would take 30 to 45 minutes. Of course we didn’t get credit for the 30 minutes we had already spent trying to order.
Ken tried to use the Medallion app on his phone to look at our account. The app claimed he wasn’t registered for this voyage.
I decided to go down to the customer service desk to see if I could get directions for the TV. I also mentioned that we weren’t able to view our account on the Medallion app. I got kind of a circular argument from them. I was told to order food on my phone. If I brought my phone they would show me how. I said I didn’t want to order on my phone - it is too small. They said they wanted to see my phone. I said I didn’t bring it - I wanted help with my TV. Finally, another person came out from the back and told me the TV ordering system doesn’t work. I didn’t say it, but I thought: Why are you always telling us we can do all these things on the TV if it doesn’t work? I asked again for directions for the TV and they looked at me like I was speaking in Athabascan. I looked at them like they were incompetent.
When I got back to the room, the room service food still hadn’t come. Yeah. And I still didn’t know how to order food on the TV.
All the cruise lines have recently developed the capability to let passengers reserve dinners, tours, and more, online, before the cruise. We made dinner reservations for each night of the cruise back in January, thinking , rather naively, that it would allow us to avoid a long line outside the dining room. (You will recall that it turned out that the dining room reservations are irrelevant.) We made reservations for some of the specialty restaurants, also, because they tend to book up very quickly. To pre-book one of the specialty restaurants, you have to pay when you book. And you can only book on the Medallion app on your phone. Easy peasy. What could possibly go wrong?
There is a brand new specialty restaurant on this ship. It’s called Sur la Mer. The restaurant is “open concept” in the atrium. The idea is that you feel like you are in a French bistro, sitting at a sidewalk table. I guess.
People walk by on their way here or there. They walk through the tables to look out the windows. They stand next to tables where people are eating, to talk to their friends. There aren’t too many sidewalk cafés where I come from, so I don’t really know how it’s supposed to feel.
Our travel agency gave us a gift of a dinner at a specialty restaurant. Much appreciated. We didn’t know about it until we arrived in our cabin. We elected to use the voucher at Sur la Mer. The hostess collected our voucher when we arrived. I asked about how to get a refund for our pre-payment. She said we would have to go to customer service. I asked whether it would be automatic and she said it would not.
The Dinner
Fried polenta and olives stuffed with goat cheese and cream cheese (excellent!)
Lobster bisque en croûte (good)
Grilled scallops in a lemony butter sauce (with orzo, not shown) and veggies (Excellent)
Baba au rhum (sad)
After dinner we had time before the show so we went to customer service to follow up on getting our refund. We were told they had no record of our pre-payments. Of course, we had nothing to prove it. When you book a tour in advance, you always find a voucher in your room as soon as you board. We had never been given anything.
Here we go again. Round and round. Hasn’t this ever happened before? Finally we were told we would have to prove it by showing them our credit card statement. Oh, gee. I forgot to pack it.
We went back to our cabin to regroup. We went online to look at our credit card statements. We didn’t know what month it would be in, but we found it. We took my iPad down to customer service and showed the agent. She got a phone out of her purse and took a picture of it. She said she would talk to her manager about it the following day. (The next day, after Ken’s phone was fixed to allow us to look at our statement, we were able to see that the pre-payments we had made were now reflected in our account.) Hell of a system they have.
Princess, you’re breaking my heart
You’re shaking my confidence daily
The Medallion has me down on my knees
I’m begging you, please, make it work . . .
The evening show was fantastic. It was an Aretha Franklin tribute show called “Queen of the Night.” So much energy!
The color of the water today was: Medallion blue
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