Here We Go...Kind of

Hello. This is my new blog. I am writing it because I got a job as an assistant waitress for Royal Caribbean. So I'm gonna write about what that's like and all.

I'm still in the beginning stages of my employment and basically have no clue what my life is going to be like once everything gets going. I don't know exactly how this is going to work, like how often I will be able to update and stuff like that. But since I'm still on land, I figured I would document the entire process. I guess I'll just jump right in and tell you how all of this came about.

I'm currently living in the Quad Cities in Illinois working as a medical assistant. I've been working at a doctor's office for about 5 months in a temporary position that will be ending in November. The time came for me to start looking for a new job and it seemed like a good time to start a new adventure. To make a long story short, a combination of obnoxious student loans and restlessness led me to researching cruise ship employment, and I decided it might be a good option for me.

It was pretty simple to get started. Cruise lines use recruiting agencies to hire most positions in the hotel department. I put together my resume and submitted it to the recruiting agency. A few days later a recruiter emailed me and said that I qualified for a prescreening interview. The interview was via Skype. She basically asked me about my work experience and told me about the job description, living arrangements, and legal documents that I would need. She helped me clean up my resume and then said that she was going to set up an interview with Royal Caribbean.

This is when it started to suck. I waited and waited for her to contact me about the interview. I drove everyone around me crazy while I was obsessing about it. FINALLY, an eternity (two weeks) later she told me that I had an interview with Royal Caribbean that would also be via Skype. A day after the interview, my recruiter called me and told me that I was hired! Woot woot.

So that was the easy part. Now I wait. There are so many things that need to be done before I can leave, but I can't do any of them until I get my date/ship assignment and I have no idea when that will happen. In the meantime I've been annoying everyone in my life talking about it constantly including my friends, family, coworkers. And my recruiter. I email her a lot. Poor lady.

So in attempt to keep me sane I'm going to be writing here. I think it will also be a good way to keep my family informed and make sure I remember this experience. And I've noticed that while there are a lot of crew blogs out there, most of them are from people in higher positions, so I think it might be nice to have the view of a lowly assistant waitress out in the blogosphere. So here we go!