We're at sea for two weeks. This requires two crew emergency drills. After the first drill, the captain decides he's really going to stress his crew, and invites the passengers to participate in the drill. (Right up to actually abandoning the ship.) Now, he doesn't just want us to be good little passengers who hear the alarm, get our life jackets, go to our muster stations, and calmly follow directions to the lifeboats. Oh hell no. Captain Tom wants to really test the crew, so invites anyone with an interest to come to a "pre-drill casting session," where he and the first officer hand out parts to play.
I am so there. I mean, when else am I going to have the opportunity to run up and down the corridors, yelling, "WE'RE GONNA DIE!!!"?
And that was, in fact, a role he was casting. (The First Officer had a few dozen strips of paper on which he'd written short descriptions of how to behave.) But there were fewer interested passengers than he'd hoped, so I had to let someone else take "panicked." (There was also "aggressively drunk," "medical emergency," and one that wasn't actually called "Karen," but was a Karen.) But he also wanted someone who speaks a foreign language and could revert back to it - on the theory that when people panic, they go back to their mother tongue. And he wanted to see what his crew would do if faced with someone who all of a sudden couldn't understand English.
I looked around at my fellow volunteers, and nobody had the language skills. I considered my own abilities and said, "I could, uh, be Deaf."
Captain and First Officer immediately decided this would be good for the drill. I got the strip of paper intended for a non-English speaker and it directed me to approach the crew member and watch them panic as they can't communicate with me and try to find a translator. Sounds fun.
I realized this was a risk. My ASL skills are substantially out of practice. (If they have an actual interpreter on board, I'm hosed.) But I googled to confirm a few signs I figured I might need, and entered the drill on the assumption that my signing knowledge was likely to be better than their signing knowledge, which was really all we needed for this to work.
It worked. It worked perfectly. I put on my confused face, looked at all the crew gathering in their life jackets, started increasing my panic and signed "what's happening?" at the nearest crewmember. He handed me a pen (he wanted to know my cabin number, but I didn't "hear" him) so I just wrote, "what's happening?" across his paper. One of his colleagues picked up on it, sat me down, and tried to explain about the (mock) fire being (mock) fought with charades. I was still confused. At some point, she had a lightbulb moment and realized she knew how to fingerspell, and she slowly signed W-A-T-E-R and pretended she was waving a hose. I calmed down. (But I stayed in character, and never lost track of where she was, because she was the one crew member who knew how to tell me what to do.)
The entire drill lasted about 45 minutes. In addition to those of us playing our roles (when the Karen put on her life jacket and asked "is this only size this comes in?" I nearly lost it), a BUNCH of other passengers decided to join in at the "abandon ship" bell, so a good deal of passengers lined up at the muster stations (and quite a few of them legit forgot where their muster station was) with life jackets and marched together to the lifeboat boarding area, where the drill ended.
We had a post-drill feedback session with the captain, where we all had many suggestions for improvement. (I suggested they learn just a handful (heh) of signs. You could do a lot with "safe," "stay," and "follow.") A surprising take-away was that the lifejackets were stunningly difficult to put on. (The nice lady had told me not to get mine; they would have extras before we get in the lifeboat. And they did. The drill ended with everyone passing me a brand new lifejacket from a cabinet near the lifeboat. I got it over my head, but the damn strap would not unwrap, wrap around me, and click in front - without the help of two other people. Not ideal for an emergency situation. Someone else timed his - it took them SEVEN MINUTES to get it on him.) This ship has different lifejackets from the rest of the line's fleet and it's pretty much item number one in the captain's notes for this ship to swap in the other type of jacket. And I'm not sure they would've known that if the Captain hadn't encouraged passengers to participate in the drill.
Felt really good to help out. And I later had a chat with my fingerspelling crewmember, who had surprised herself when realizing that she knew how to do that. Now, she has a bit of added confidence that she could cope with this scenario.
Here's yesterday's sunset. You're welcome.
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