Safety Testing

Safety exam.....October 14th....high noon. Written in blood or maybe black ink on the tattered piece of paper rolled up in my door handle. I miss door knobs. All we have are those sideways handles that protrude out and to the left. Every door is like that. Pushing on them is weird. Unnatural. The same could never be said about door knobs. They're a joy to push or pull. AND they're (most often) turned clockwise. These things are turned the opposite way so you gotta use your left hand, at least if you're as uncoordinated as I am.

The fateful day arrives. I show up at the saloon (crew lounge) and the arcade is unplugged right as I enter. The music screeches to a halt and everyone stares up at me for a moment. I make my way to the seat where the tests are handed out. 6 pages of minutiae about every aspect of safety and emergency protocol. Fire classes, types of extinguishers, emergency codes, muster station locations, roll around and around in my barren, sleep deprived head like tumbleweeds.

After finishing the exam, we had to have the examiner (the same lecturer from the safety course who's name and what he does on the ship I'm supposed to know but don't) look it over. My turn came up and we sat across from each other at one of the lopsided, uneven tables in the lounge with 4 aluminum legs that come together at the middle before speading out in 4 directions once on the floor. That, along with the laquered tribal design of the table, and the way it leans to one side while the ship rocks makes it look like a smushed mushroom.

Tension. He doesn't say a word while he looks over the test. Occasionally he shoots me a look of surprise and continues reading. Did I get something wrong? Why does he turn the pages so violently? He continues reading and re-reading my exam, bobbing his head up and down rhythmically as if he were listening to hip hop on an invisible pair of headphones. Then came the questions. Stuff I got right, he asked. Stuff I didn't know, he asked. Did I really get that one right? Did I really get that one wrong? One after the other. Keeping me off balance. I think he asked about the different fire classes, which I knew. Then he followed up with which letter corresponded to which type of fire, which I wasn't so sure of.

"Uhhhh, A is solid, B is combustible liquid, I think C is electrical, right?"
to which he immediately responded,

"What is this? You ask-uh ME the questions now? I ask-uh the questions!! YOU ANSWER THE QUESTIONS!" pounding the psychadelic mushroom table for emphasis.

He had me demonstrate how to operate the fire doors and locate the weather doors and a bunch of other things. Then he asked me to get the fire extinguishers out of the nearby closet. He asked me how you use them, to which I responded some lame faxsimile of the P.A.S.S. method we were taught. That's Pull out the pin, Aim at the fire, Spray said fire, then Sweep the stream left to right.

"Show me," he said.

I pulled out the pin, picked up the fire extinguisher and pretend aimed and sprayed and sweeped at the imaginary fire.

"I SAID SHOW ME," he said louder.

So I started spraying and sweeping for real in front of everyone. For those of you who have never sprayed a fire extinguisher, those suckers are LOUD and the spray goes everywhere and smells funny. After a second or two I stopped this demonstration. At the moment I stopped, he yelled out,

"DON'T STOP! KEEP-UH GOING!"

I did

"THAT'S IT! DO IT!!! KEEP-UH GOING! KEEP-UH GOING!"

As I sprayed the extinguisher left and right, left and right. The spray hitting his shoes and legs and the door and everything. For like 15-20 seconds I sprayed while he shouted encouragement, his face a mix of a drill sergeant's intense demeanor and a childlike excitement of getting to shoot something loud and messy indoors.