During the summer I work as a Danish,English, French and Italian Guide in the canals of Copenhagen. I love my job, I really do! I get to spend the days outside in the fresh air, practice my languages, talk with loads of people, get a good salary and a LOT of tips.
The following blog entry is just my personal story with personal opinions, and is nothing from the company.
Things got a little out of hand saturday. As a normal shift I start my day at 9.45 am and around 6pm I change the boat from being an open-air boat to a closed boat (because of the coldness of the sea and the rain). I’m about to do my last 1-hour tour starting at 7 pm, when it starts to rain. We quickly get passenger into the closed boat and I cover myself with a professional rain suit provided by the company. We leave dock at 7.05 pm and head out towards the little mermaid. On board I have a bachelor’s party (with a famous person) that are very drunk already, lots of couples from around the world, some Spanish some French, 2 danish families and a group of young students aged 14-15.
(Photokilde: TV2)
By the time we pass the opera house around 7.10 pm, the glass is so fogged that nobody can even see the opera which is a huge 14-story building, wide as the size of two football fields. The rain gets worse and is now a thunderstorm and within the next hour there will be 5000 lightnings and 150 mm rain falling. The boat is not built for such extremes weather so there is water leaking in different places. I try to look at the positive side of it and joke a little about it, but after another 10 min where nobody can see anything, I went out into the rain crossing 3 meters and into the captains cabin to ask what we should do.
The captain is struggling. He can’t see anything either and tries to navigate the boat, wipe the windows and contacting land with his radio. I help the poor old guy, and we manage to figure out where the hell we are in the harbor (it’s huge)… we are not far from the little mermaid, but it’s a dangerous place because its full of enormous stones infront of her, and with the wind blowing, the captain doesn’t have the same amount of control over his ship as usual.
We manage to turn around in complete blindness and put ourselves about 10 m from a high docking area, we continue to keep this position so we don’t crash anywhere or into anyone else. I haven’t informed thepassengers whats going on, because i am too busy helping the captain, who cannot reach the central on land.
To make everything more perfect, the alarm goes off about too much water INSIDE the boat and that if not emptied the engine will fail and the boat will eventually sink. GREAT! The old fart (captain) doesn’t know what to do.
We decide to move towards “the island” (the headquaters) and tie off the boat so it can’t go anywhere, which is much safer than staying on open sea. Once there, I inform the passengers that we wait there for a while until we get other instructions. However not all passengers understand danish/english/french or Italian and they were scared and didn’t know what was going on. I couldn’t inform all the passengers at once since the microphone doesnt work under water (the rain) and the bachelors party wouldn’t shut the fuck up.
We can’t get the passengers off into safety on land because the steps that is used to get up was one large water fall. We stay put there for some time, while more and more water comes into the boat and the passangers have water up to their ankles, they still can’t see anything and it’s just a mess!
I go back to the captain, who had the alarm turned off, and he anounces that we will leave for Nyhavn (where we started) but since we can’t go into the canal, we have to leave the passengers at the end of the canal in the middle of no where. We get there and by this time around 8 pm I can’t be more wet. I feel water running in my underwear! I stop trying to get wet and focus on getting the customers out and into safety.
I inform the passengers that everyone should leave the boat here since we have to empty it from water. People get ANGRY with me, because they have to go out into the extreme weather (only rain, no wind!) and as nothing else matters, they keep asking about getting their money back. To me it’s a ridiculous question, now it’s a matter of safety, and of course they will have their money back when they haven’t even had a tour. But I didn’t have the position to say out loud that they could have their money back. They were angry with me because I didn’t have cash on me, and I told them to come back the following day and get a free ride, or their money back. But some passengers couldn’t come the following day and as they left the boat, one person spat on me, and said that was the worst service they have ever had!
That hurt deep into my heart, studying service management, I’ve done everything that I’ve read should have been done in theory: handle the situation in a professional manner by staying calm yourself, inform passengers with most needed information (but not too much), ask if everyone is ok, and just get people into safety, and tell them what to do.
I got home at 9 pm from a ride from my captain. I was PISSED at the management for sending us out when they KNEW the storm was coming, and for the radio’s not to work when they are the most needed!
I called my mom (working as a nurse with specialty is anastesi) and cried over the phone and told her everything. (I was in shock afterwards)… that helped and now i’m fine.
) just wanting a thermal mug for my tea, and my mind wonders back to America to all the cool and amazingly cheap mugs that you can buy at the grocery store like wallmart, k-mart or meijers. So why don’t we do that here? No right, the country is too small.
