A Tale Of Two Ships
One Ship Had A Normal Cruise
The Other Was A Near Disasterous Incident
Numerous cruise ship pasengers have come to us to give us the details of the cruise. We read the accounts, then sat back and tried to sort out the events.
The first accounts read were for a ship that sat like a lame duck on tropical storm tossed seas, where passengers scrambled to disembark in some dreadful circumstances.
The next wave of passenger accounts said they had a lovely cruise, normal in every aspect, with a "routine" disembarkment, on a beautiful sunny day with glassy calm seas.
The only problem with the half dozen accounts is that everyone was talking about the same ship on the same exact cruise.
One Cruise Bruise visitor, Sarah, called us "sensationlists who could turn winning the million dollar lottery into a death and destruction scenario news story", as she claimed the cruise "was perfect in every way, and I was ready to go on another on that very ship as soon as I got home."
When I quoted that line to two of our visitors, they balked and said she must have been drunk until she got home.
When I quoted those who said the cruise became a nightmare from the time the ship lost power until they got back on land to Sarah, she said they must have been high on LSD and hallucinated the story they gave us.
Drugs, alcohol or reality, those scenarios do play out in our cases. The trick becomes, how to find reality among the drugs and alcohol.
One of my personal favorite one liners is "If you give enough drugs or alcohol to some passengers, they can survive a sinking ship where others died and say it was the best time of their lives."
That one line applies to many of the emails we get from pro-cruise industry boosters. Still, it makes me wonder how a half dozen passengers can be on a ship and tell two entirely different versions of the weather events.
This reminded of an event that happened over twenty years ago. I was near home, only a few blocks away at a major intersection, when I witnessed an automobile accident. A man in his late 30s ran a red light and hit a woman in her 80s. The man had a passenger in his car, who looked to be in her late 20s.
The man was driving north through the intersection in car #1 when he ran the red light and came to stop north of the intersection, directly across the street from my southbound vehicle ,north of the intersection. The senior citizen in car #2 had been traveling east through the intersection when she was T-boned.
I know the light was red when he ran it, because I had already began to break for the redlight and was almost to a complete stop, behind two other cars that had already come to a complete stop. I looked up and saw the light was red.
I also know the man driving car #1 was at fault, because I saw him driving the car, but more importantly I watched as the man brought the car to a stop, slid over to the passenger's seat, and had the woman slide over the top of him so she could get into the driver's seat. He remained in the car and she exited the driver's door to attend to the accident details.
When I gave my account of the accident to the police, I named the man as the driver of car #1, but did not mention the driver switch.
A couple months later an investigator called me on the telephone wanting a deposition. He identified himself as an attorney representing the young woman who was driving car #1.
According to him, several other witnesses put the young woman behind the wheel of car #1 and said that the senior citizen ran the red light, and I was mistaken. There was no mistake. I watched the two in car #1 switch seats and I told the investigator that. He discounted it, and that was that, end of case.
I don't know who the other "several witnesses" were, but I do know none of them were on the north side of the intersection with me, because all of those cars left when the light turned green. This means none of the witnesses could have possibly seen the man and woman switch seats. What they might have seen was the woman exiting the car or walking to the intersection to check on the woman in car #2. From that, they concluded she was the driver of the vehicle. They were all wrong.
The reality of that incident was likely that the man had been drinking, had an expired license or some other legal issue that would be complicated by the fact that he was driving the car, and shouldn't have been.
In A Tale Of Two Ships, I can't begin to imagine how it was sunny and beautiful according to one set of passengers and a tropical storm sea to a seperate set of passengers. I know that the ship is big, but is it big enough to be dry and sunny on one side, and wet and windy on the other?
The bottom line is you can ask any group of 100 people for an exact account of any event, and you may get 100 different accounts. I know I myself have made the mistake of seeing an event differently than it actually was.
Many years ago I was nearly robbed at an ATM by a machete wielding robber. After I got away, I immediately called police and they arrived on the scene, I had already fled, and made an arrest of two men. The only problem was I had been attacked by three men. That is what I reported to police. They called me back to the scene of the crime to identify the men.
There were three men, all standing in the dark, police lights shining on them, and I gave a positive identification that these were the three who tried to rob me. None of the men had a machete when police found them, and they suggested I was incorrect, initially.
As it turned out, only two of the men tried to rob me. The third was a young man in the military who had arrived at the ATM on foot and had been taken as a hostage, after they had robbed him at the ATM just prior to me arriving at the scene in a vehicle.
They were about to rob me, take my vehicle with all of us in it, murder us both with the machete, dump our bodies and escape in my vehicle. My quick thinking saved two lives. The confusion of my escape gave the hostage an opportunity to run, and the two thugs were chasing him when police arrived on the scene.
The machete was found in the bushes in front of another bank a block from the arrest scene.
Later I learned the two men arrested plead guilty to a minor offense and basically got slapped on the wrists, as first time juvenile offenders. The oldest of the two was 16 years old.
I know that things are not always as they seem, and getting at the truth can be tricky business. We report what we are told, and leave it up to our visitors to sort out the truth of the events. That is the best we can do.
