Telecommunications

One of the biggest components of my job is topping off seafarers' sim cards. Almost all of the mariners have great difficulty understanding the voice prompts on the t-mobile customer service hotline (for which I can't blame them in the least), so it's much easier for everyone involved if I just do it for them. Of course, this means that I have had to learn how to handle cell phones of all shapes, sizes, qualities, and nationalities - which is both harder and more interesting than you might think.

Complication #1: because of our proximity to Newark airport, t-mobile service is ABYSMAL in the port. Finding a signal is usually a complicated game of turning the phone on and off repeatedly and wandering around the ship until you find a magical spot (the last bit is a blatant violation of security protocol, but no one seems to care.). Complication #2: ships are incredibly loud. The volume of the background noise confuses hell out of the system's voice recognition capacity, and I usually have to try several times before it works. Complication #3: veteran seafarers who are aware of the first 2 complications will often times just chuck their phones in front of me, say "top off!" and then leave. Sometimes they'll pay in advance, sometimes not. Sometimes they'll tell me how much money they want me to put on, sometimes not. It's all a bit of a guessing game.

Of course, the biggest complicating factor is that, half the time, the phones are in other languages. I recently had to ask a burly Russian seafarer for help when I inadvertently accessed his picture library and got the screen stuck on an image of a curvy blonde woman wearing nothing but a santa hat. Not awkward at all.

But today, I think, I made the most awkward phone faux-pas of my life in trying to top off the absurdly complicated phone of a Turkish guy. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how to get the damn thing to dial - random menu screens in Turkish kept popping up, and I kept on pressing buttons, hoping it would go away. At some point, I gave up and returned to the seafarer for help. He took one look at the screen, gasped in horror, and let loose what was clearly a stream of Turkish invective. Much frantic translation revealed that I had accidentally called his ex-girlfriend. Oops. So much for chaplains making seafarers' lives easier.