I embark on my Central American cruise

So, having taken a leave of absence from my prior project (the one I have been on since June but which now is on life support, with only 40 hours a week and no actual work to do), I am headed for Central America. As I boarded my cruise ship, I managed to snag a seat at the end of the row (not the end against the wall, unfortunately), thus limiting my potential exposure to a single temp. Alas, my back is wide open. Still, it is not the worst seat ever.

I can see from here that this cruise has no buffet, nor are there private staterooms. In fact, they seem to have chained me to an oar:

Damn.  That sucks. As vacations go, this one is turning out not so good.

On the other hand, I have just been informed that there will be more than 30 hours of overtime available per week. So we have that going for us. On the other hand, since we started yesterday, we have been in orientation and training for two days now and have totaled only 14 hours. There will not be 30 hours of overtime this week, for sure. I'm not real clear on what kind of training and orientation we need to go to Central America, especially since none of it involves learning Spanish, but there you go.

There are a number of familiar faces here -- at least three people from my last project who apparently decided it was a good time to go to Central America. Tempted by the overtime, no doubt. There also were a pretty good number of folks from the L Street Massacre back in September. They were not among the most competent of temps then, either. Yes, Milhouse was one of them. Of course, he got here late enough that he couldn't find a good seat, and so he wanted to go to the other suite we're using because he "wanted to see if I like this side better." I sympathize -- your seat is all you have, after all -- but you go where they tell you. You're a temp, dude. Choices R Not Us. Deal with it.

I will have more comments on orientation later.