Well, we lost our guitar player, Ben – the musician found with a female passenger in a crew area. He was fired after all.

They don't give you much notice when they fire you. He was informed of the decision early Sunday morning and was off the ship by 2:00 p.m. If they had found an earlier flight for him, he would have been off earlier. They paid for his flight back to Montreal though. First class, too!

Ben had been on the ship since its launch in Turku, Finland over a year ago. It was probably time for him to move on, but he'll be missed.

Ben had support from the division head, and his supervisor (Vern), but they were only two of the five senior staff at the disciplinary meeting. And the captain, of course, has the final say.

Nobody blames the captain for what he had to do. Captain Johnny pointed out that Ben had just completed refresher training in company ethics the very morning before his misadventure, and the ink wasn't yet dry on the agreement he signed binding him to the company's ethical rules and policies, three of which he broke later that night.

In theory, any one of the three infractions is grounds for dismissal.

Ben wasn't the only long-time musician to leave the ship today. Ron, our drummer, also left, due to a medical condition in his right arm, probably carpal tunnel, a condition that has prevented him from working for over a week. Ron gets to collect 80% of his pay for the remainder of his contract, however. He had about three weeks to go.

And if that weren't bad enough, the alto sax player who was supposed to join us today to fill that position (which has been vacant for a few weeks now) failed to show. Nobody knows why, yet, or where he might be, but he's coming from Argentina and a lot can happen between Argentina and Orlando.

This band is definitely not playing with a full deck!

This lack of personnel means our workload has been a little lighter than usual – or should I say even lighter than usual... We do the production shows, because thesound guys can bring up the recorded tracks to replace the missing instruments (remember, we play to a click). But we cancelled the live “Intimate Jazz” sets as being impossible to do without a rehearsed drummer (if we could even find an available drummer on the ship). We've also had to change the repertoire for the big band set at the Captain's Cocktail.

We're just lucky that we've been able to commandeer the talents of Oldo, the drummer from the Polish lounge group. He's a very good drummer, and has worked out well as a replacement for Ron. But he'e busy with other stuff – like his own job on the ship.
There's no guitar player around here to replace Ben.

I don't envy Vern, the musical director. He's going on vacation in two weeks, and there are still some other changes to be made before things settle down. Henry, our piano player leaves next week. And our “new” trumpet player, David, has been contracted to fill in for only three weeks. And all this just coming up to the holiday season, when it's almost impossible to find available musicians.

To his credit Vern is taking this all in stride. “What can you do?”, he says.



Ben (left) and Juan, both now gone, in corridor