My Pleasure!

I'm starting to run out of boring stories from our Christmas cruise, so today I'm going to relate a boring story from a previous cruise. Lucky you!

Last March we took a cruise to celebrate my 40^th birthday. During our first dinner, our waiter introduced our assistant waiter by saying, "This is Kerman. He does not know what he is doing." We all got a good laugh out of that one, not realizing that he was being completely serious. Poor Kerman had only been with the cruise line for two weeks, and judging from our experience this was apparently the first time he has ever had contact with other human beings.

From what we have heard, Royal Caribbean teaches its workers to respond to people by saying, "my pleasure," instead of saying "thank you" to cruise passengers. Kerman apparently took this directive very seriously, because no matter what we would say to him, he would say, "my pleasure." Here's a verbatim transcript from one of his conversations with one of the ladies who was sitting at our table:

Kerman: (noticing her bowl of soup was still full) "You did not like your soup?"

Woman: "No, it didn't suit my tastes."

Kerman: "My pleasure!"

Needless to say, right from Day 1 of the trip, we began referring to him as "My Pleasure" instead of any other name.

My Pleasure (later in the trip, we simply called him "MP" for short) was also amusing for his ability to completely forget what he was going to get for us. Most nights I would ask for a refill of Diet Coke, and he'd take a few steps away from the table and we could tell that he had already forgotten where he was going.

My brother would ask him for iced tea, and this would confuse him further. We could see him standing at the drink station, looking toward the ceiling with no clue why he was standing there. And he'd almost never get our drink orders even close to correct. He was also obsessed with offering us a tray of rolls numerous times each meal.

Normally we get annoyed by this kind of service, but in this case we were pretty amused by it. I looked forward to dinner each night, not knowing what kinds of drinks we'd wind up with. The last night of the trip I somehow ended up with 10 – yes… 10! – glasses of Diet Coke in front of me. We were all laughing so hard, but I composed myself well enough to ask him for another one when he came back to the table after finishing them all.

We often wonder whatever became of My Pleasure. Is he still waiting tables on a ship? He could still be in therapy after enduring us during our trip.