Another boring "just for me" entry. I'm writing this to decompress from a frustrating afternoon and evening.
The packet for the Hawaiian Cruise arrived by courier early this past week. There were 50 thousand pieces of paper and booklets and everything else in there. It took me one full day just to go through it and see if there was anything I had to do. There was. Tours and excursions had to be booked at least 14 days before the sail date, AND I have to "pre-register" at least 14 days before. Luckily, both jobs could be done online.
Naturally, I left it 'til yesterday (Friday, the 29th) to take a detailed look. The sail date is 8/14. Uh-oh.
I don't know why this "pre-register" stuff. I'm already registered! Everything they ask for on the preregistration form is already on the papers they sent me, but one piece of the info was on this paper, and another bit on another, and ... it involved a lot of shuffling through the stack to find it all. Took me an hour to pre-register. And it was actually fairly simple, if all the information had been in one place. Like, uh, maybe already ON the preregistration form?
Then I turned to the tours and excursions task. Edith, if you are reading this, I found a post-retirement job for you. These people are in desperate need of a human factors advisor!
The itinerary, in the form of "8/14/05 Depart Waikiki 8:00 pm. 8/15/05 Dock Kauai 7:00 am. 8/16/05 Depart Kauai 3:00 pm. ...." was in a book of coupons for all the reservations. Which would not stay open if you set it down.
I had long ago signed up for several "exclusive" tours and events (I'm not sure who's being excluded), and the dates, times, and descriptions for those were on a 5-page letter I had received several weeks ago. They were listed by calendar date.
The descriptions of the additional possible tours, for which I had to sign up now, were in a tall narrow thick booklet on heavy shiny paper, with a flat glued binding - which meant that it was hard to hold it open with one hand and impossible to set it down and expect it to stay open, unless you took a chance on cracking the binding and having all the pages fall out.
Note that the book did not have an index or TOC to make it easy to find a particular tour.
The days and times of the actually available tours were not in the booklet, but on 4 pages printed on both sides of legal-length paper. The names of the tours matched those in the aforementioned booklet, but the identifying numbers did not. Also, they were organized not by day, but by island. Like "Waikiki Day 1; Waikiki Day 2; Kauai Day 1; Kauai Day 2; Hilo [which is a city, not an island, confusing] Day 1 and so on, which was very hard to put together with the itinerary in the book of coupons. They had a "start time" and "duration", which I'd have to interleave somehow with the five pages of exclusive tours and departure and docking times.
Agh!
So I made me a chart. I gave up working at the desk, and spread everything out on the bed (which means that from here on, everytime I reached for a particular piece of paper, there was a cat sitting on it). I got some graph paper, and put the days across the top, by day and date. Then I put the time, starting at 7 am and ending at 6 am down the side. I pulled out the itinerary, and shaded in all the times we would actually be sailing (Kauai to Hilo is 18 hours! Wow!). I wrote at the top of the shaded area where we were leaving from, and at the bottom where we were arriving at. Now "Kauai Day 1" made sense.
Then I got out the five pages of exclusive tours, and marked them in with a straight line from the start to the end time. Now I could see all the free time, when I could schedule other activities. It looked like a lot of free time. Too much free time. Oh, sleep. I drew a line across at the midnight point and wrote "go to sleep", and shaded below it. That looked more reasonable. (That's where most of the sailing time was, too (of course)).
Now I have some basis on which to schedule some more excursions.
For each day, I went to the multipage list of tours and I circled the start times of all the tours for that day's island that would fit into the available time (skipping all those that looked like they involved ATVs or zip lines or bathing suits or near-vertical climbs). Then I went to the narrow description book and looked them each up, read the descriptions, and marked the most interesting one for that slot. I noted the page numbers of the day's three most interesting ones on the legal-sized sheets (I don't know why "they" couldn't have done at least that).
ThenI marked my first choice on the chart with a dotted line from start time to end time.
After I got all done, I noticed that here and there I'd left myself only 45 minutes for lunch or dinner. Many of the exclusive excursions included a meal, so I decided to reread the exclusive tour descriptions to make sure. The first one I checked, I found to my horror that it included not only lunch, but a visit to XYZ falls among a lot of other stuff, and the tour I had chosen for the afternoon was - tada! - to XYZ falls. Agh!
So now I had to go back and reread all the descriptions of everything I had selected to make sure I wasn't duplicating.
Luckily, I had done my chart in pencil.
It looks good now. Except for the night of the luau, I have nothing scheduled from 5 pm on, most days actually end a little earlier, so I won't wear myself out. Unfortunately, every day starts at or before 8 am (the "exclusive" Pearl Harbor tour starts at 7 am, the day after I fly in - ouch!), and I'm not a morning person. Maybe jet lag will work to my advantage.
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Now, the human factors part. We have computers now. I'll bet a simple computer program could pull together the sailing times and "exclusive" tours from their data bases, and print out a personalized chart that looks like what I made up. In all the free time slots, they could list all the other tours that could be chosen, that don't duplicate the exclusive tours, complete with the page number in the danged booklet! Then to choose and schedule the additional tours, we customers would have to look only at that chart and quickly look up the descriptions if necessary.
Sheesh. Get with the program, folks!
(Of course, the tours are nonrefundable. So if you screw up the scheduling and don't make the tour departure, gee, tough luck. That might work to their advantage. Maybe they don't want to make it easier?)
~~Silk
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