On 18 June 2014 15:38, Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <nobody@simplelists.com> wrote:

This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (philpugliese@yahoo.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original message follows:

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On Wed, 6/18/14, Jeffrey Schwartz <schwartz.jeffrey@gmail.com> wrote:

Friend of mine works for Norwegian cruise lines as one of
the 2
network engineers on the ship. He's listed as the lowest
level officer
rating you can get, but officers get access to passenger
ameneties, so
he gets the same awesome food, pool , etc when off-shift.
He also has zero expenses for 10 months out of the year
(other 2
months ship is in refit) so it works pretty well.

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Any info wrt what the 'other ranks' get?

If it helps, my sister worked as a chef on a £4 million yacht that operated mainly in the Med. Owner and guests had, of course, sumptious suites, she had a shared cabin right in the forecastle (two bunks) which narrowed so much towards the floor that you could just stand in there. (nicely fitted out though). She and other crew had a sort of run of the ship when owner not aboard. Indeed, when the ship visited Brighton (about 70 miles east of home) we drove over just to visit. Had a tour, sat on deck drinking tea and enjoying other people peering over the docks at us!

FWIW, in my dilettante scenario with the aforementioned County-class ship, I have the staff allowed to use various facilities when nobles not aboard. BUT it's a carefully managed perk and woebetide any servant the Butler or Housekeeper finds abusing it. Most servants would jealously guard their allowance of that perk and besides any formal punishment woebetide any of their colleagues who risked jeopardising it for everyone.

I have this image of a movie I saw once where the Capt of an 18th century UK ship-of-the-line lived in a sumptous suite while the lot of the 'swabbies' was truly abysmal...

I think that may have been a movie. Nelson himself slept in a hammock (ok, quite a nice hammock) but his 'sumptous' quarters were shared and became a gun deck in battle.