Day Fourteen – Sea Day 3 of 3 – last day before Southampton and home

Or, in this instance, bumpety bump.

The last day always goes by in a whirl. It was still warm enough for shorts and flip-flops, but still a little on the bumpy side (it’ll calm down again once we enter the Channel). A mixture of packing and filling in forms took up most of the day. Dad met with the Customer Services Manager to discuss not only the party in Ajaccio and the offence it probably caused, but the miserable way our complaint has been handled by her staff.

My cabin steward blotted his copybook tonight (not wise the day before tip day!), by not having finished my cabin by the time I came back from dinner. He said he had started at the other end today. Really? You’ve been so badly trained that no one told you to do the first sitting passengers while they are out, and then do the second sitting passengers when THEY, in turn, go for dinner? Seems pretty bloomin’ obvious to me, but then I think I’ve been on cruise ships a lot longer than most of the crew on this ship. I’ve actually started to wonder if this is a training ship, where new staff come to learn their trade, before being let loose on ‘proper’ passengers on ‘proper’ ships. Because there isn’t a single department on here that hasn’t in some way behaved in an incompetent/ downright shambolic manner at some point over the last two weeks. Food? Tick. Cabins? Now tick. Reception/Customer Service? Tick. Maintenance? Didn’t stop hammering during the minute’s silence. Tick. It’s pretty woeful, frankly.

Still, for all my apparent criticisms, the weather has been brilliant and all the ports enjoyable, so overall, we had a good time. We always do. It takes a lot to ruin a cruise in our eyes – we’re usually just really happy to be there. But the little niggles that mar things, and prevent you from having an even better time, they’re the ones that bug me. Because they CAN do it, when they can be bothered. It just seems that, on Oceana, at the moment, they can’t.

Next cruise: January 2016. Toodle pip!