The sad tale of 'John' the American videographer Part 2

By now I’d had ‘John’ onboard for one cruise and definitely was raising some red flags in terms of his onboard behaviour and competency at the job. His first Martini Demo shoot & edit had been so bad I’d had to leave it off the final DVD and it had taken him over 6 hours to edit, while he had not got to grips with the export process at the end of the edit and frankly I did not trust him at all yet to do any task by himself.

Socially, a red flag was that he didn’t seem to be bonding at all with the rest of the the team and kept himself to himself which is completely understandable when you first join a ship as you can be overwhelmed by the drastic change in lifestyle but for example if people know you worked on Top Gun & Titanic then people will want to talk to you about it. He clearly didn’t want to talk about his Hollywood days and would just ignore someone if they asked about it, once Deanne one of the photogs jokingly said ‘Hey John are you going to make everyone wear aviators like Top Gun to make Reflections cooler?’ He got up and walked out of the bar without even looking at us, ‘was it something I said?’ Deanne asked, I said I would have a word with him but by the time I got outside the bar he’d gone.

We also questioned if this guy had any of his own clothes with him, apparently according to Chad he had hardly any luggage with him and whenever we saw him ‘off duty’ he was always in his ship uniform, even when he was ashore in his time off! Next he asked me if he could get an advance on his wages as he had ‘some stuff in storage’ and I said he would need to speak to the crew office and our manager Cassie but I told him it was very unlikely and I’d never heard of it.

John was also very slow and being in the unique experience of having 3 videographers onboard which should have been a good thing it was becoming a nightmare because I could only get in to edit after 10pm most nights, as much of a dick as Chad was at least he was competent at the job to a level that I could mostly assign him a task and he would do it, with John we both had to babysit him every step of the way. Next John had a whale watching tour in Juneau, this was one of the most popular tours and almost always resulted in amazing footage (or your money back if you didn’t see whales said the tour operator) I knew John was going to film a mountain of footage and fair enough you don’t want to miss a whale breaching and so the first time on a whale watch tour you tend to overshoot so i told John to make sure he filmed no more than 1 hour.

When he got back I got a call from Chad telling me to get down to the video room. I was expecting the worst. For some unknown reason John had taken two cameras and recorded almost 3 hours of footage filling up both tapes at the time, but bizarrely on one of the cameras he had left the lens cap on and had only recorded sound that generally was unusable because of the wind noise. I told him there was no need to capture 90 minutes of windy noise and we all started looking through his footage. It was handheld, shaky, out of focus and also he had missed all the good shots that happened off camera, ‘er..John why didn’t you use the tripod mate?’ I asked ‘Well I wanted to go handheld’ was his reply with no further explanation, despite being told to use the tripod beforehand. As we went through the shots once again it was obvious all the footage was unusable.

I tried to be diplomatic and said ‘well its a tough shoot, no worries’ and I re-edited one of the Chads videos from the same port from a previous cruise so we had some whale footage on the video. ‘So your not using it then? John asked, ‘I’m afraid not, if we don’t have good whale footage on the DVD it will hurt sales’ I replied. John got up and left the room without a word. Even Chad at this point was exasperated ‘Ah man thats fucking bullshit man, has the guy ever shot anything before’ I had to admit in a rare instance I agreed with Chad. I gave Cassie a quick call and said that John was not progressing very well so far and we were now into his 2nd cruise, he said he’d heard from some of the team that he was slightly odd and stand offish and that to keep an eye on him and let him know if he’d improved by the end of the cruise.

It was Martini night in the ward room which meant even stronger cheaper drinks than usual and everyone was imbibing fairly heavily, as drinks were so cheap everyone would buy rounds for everyone but of course we didn’t see John buy a single drink all night. As one of the dancers walked past John loudly proclaimed ‘she needs a good hard fucking’ which kind of made the room stop a little and suddenly it was very awkward. Despite him being twice my age I had to subtly tell John to call it a night, ‘What time is your tour tomorrow?’ I asked him, bearing in mind it was almost 2a.m ‘Around 9’ he said. He didn’t get the hint, well I wasn’t about to babysit him and he was still in the bar when I left around 2.30a.m sat sadly by himself.

We were in Skagway the next day and John was on the White Pass railway tour and I was just praying he used a tripod and kept it to just one tape of footage. Around 10a.m my pager bleeped off and it was the Shore excursions manager Rebecca ‘I’m not very impressed with your junior’ she began ‘oh what’s Chad done now? I asked. ‘No your new one the older guy’ Apparently he had been late for his tour (most likely due to being in the bar till gone 2.30am the night before filming) because he had been sitting getting a coffee and missed the train he was supposed to be on, so he just sat and waited and got on the next one which excursions had to check was okay because of hi-pax numbers on it. John apparently didn’t realise that he had to go on the exact train and time departure on his ticket. ‘Don’t worry, I put on the next one’ Rebecca told me, ‘Thanks Rebecca, I’ll have a word when he gets back, I didn’t think I needed to explain to him that he needed to be on the tour thats on his ticket, I mean thats common sense right? ‘Americans they don’t have common sense’ she replied.

I was waiting in the video room when John got back from his tour, ‘Hey, so good tour today mate, any issues? I enquired ‘No it was good everything was fine’ Now he was directly lying to my face which greatly annoyed me! ‘So then why did I have the shore ex manager ringing me to tell me you had missed your tour and she had to put you on the next one?’ ‘Oh she called you did she?’ ‘We’ll yeah mate we have to keep shore ex happy otherwise we won’t get given the good excursions’ ‘Oh well she’s a fucking bitch anyway, Man everyones always on me on this ship, my work is so much better than what you are doing, Fuck you guys. ‘John, are these your keys? I asked, he nodded I took the video room key off the chain and told him to go back to his cabin. He left without a word.

I called up Cassie again and he agreed John was not working out and we decided fairly quickly that John would be going home in two days in Seattle. Per ships rules we only told John we was going home the day before Seattle because if you are firing someone you don’t want them going around the ship causing issues for days before they are put off. When we had the meeting with management and the CDS John again started ranting and swearing at everyone, he was done.

It’s not a good feeling having to fire someone but you literally sink or swim in the video department onboard and you can’t bullshit your way through the job as you can in the photo department where you can learn to shoot, serve and smudge fairly quickly. With video you need to know editing software & encoding on top of being able to shoot and get on well with your team and passengers to improve your DVD sales. John had shown no improvement in the technical or attitude department and I almost felt sorry for him but also head office should have done of a better job of vetting this guy before sending him out.

After he was told he was going home on the last sea day I don’t think he left the cabin and we didn’t see him at all on the last day of the cruise when we docked in Victoria. As I was getting ready to go out for a night on the town in Canada I saw John standing in my doorway (still in his uniform) ‘Why did you decide to get rid of me?’ he asked quite meekly, ‘Look John, you’ve been here two cruises and you’d made no progress in regards to learning how the technical side of the job works, you’ve lied to me, you’ve missed tours and you can’t speak to your bosses onboard the way you did earlier today. I’m sorry but I was excited to learn from you when head office told me your background but as someone twice my age I shouldn’t have to tell you about drinking responsibly. I just don’t think you are cut out for ship life’

He mumbled something about everyone being against and I walked past him making sure my cabin was locked, it was truly depressing seeing someone in that situation but if you the kind of person who doesn’t integrate well into a team and potentially have alcohol issues then ship life is not for you.

A few months later I had to block ‘John’ on social media and Chad told me that he was planning on suing the company, the bosses were not worried and John didn’t have a chance of it getting anywhere, I later heard from Chad that he had been ranting on social media about me, but even back in 2009 the best way to deal with people like that on social media is to block them and even when other people are saying ‘oh did you see what he said about you? I’d reply ‘nope and I don’t care, he’s blocked and I’ll never work with him again.

After the dust had settled and we talked to head office and they did some more digging it turned out he had worked with James Cameron on some big films but his job was as a camera rigger and he had little to no camera and editing experience so ends the sad tale of ‘John’ the first person I ever had to recommend we fire