The Bahamas
Laundry with Chickens: Errands Island Style
Matt is a smart person. He ordered a Bahamian SIM card online before we left. It started working out in the ocean, before we even saw Bahamian land. Lucky Matt!
It was Matt's turn to do laundry. In fact, he had offered to take over all laundry duties after I kept coming back from public laundry facilities bruised, enraged and screaming bloody murder at my fight club opponents.
Matt felt that as he was quite happy sitting in his old velvet jump suit, eating government cheese, browsing through Instragram to see what the Bahamas look like, that laundry was not neccessary. It would be up to me to run some island errands.
First up: Donny's back porch for laundry. Donny runs a dock here on Green Turtle Cay. He does not have a fancy office, a pool, or a captain's lounge, but he will let you do laundry on his back porch if you are "nice". Donny asks everyone if they are "naughty or nice". If he doesn't trust your answer, he'll ask your spouse. Donny didn't search twitter for #fightclublaundry, so he believed me when I said I was "nice".
Quite a happy family of roosters and hens kept me company. Just as I had dawdled for an extra 2.5 seconds between the spin ending and transferring my clothes into the dryer, a new hen flew in. Chaos erupted. The rooster had hard words to say. The other hens charged. Full on Bahamian fight club at the laundry machines! I loaded the dryer and checked my watch. I could totally run into town, get a SIM card, and get back before the dryer finished and some one (likely someone from Vero Beach) dumped my fresh clean clothes on the ground (out of spite).
The cell phone office is open from 9:30AM-3PM on Thursdays. But not during December or most of January. Last Thursday, the office "re-opened". Sadly, they had 2 SIM cards available and 22 people wanting SIM cards. There was a mini-riot and people who had just arrived from Florida thought about turning around.
At 9:15AM, on a lovely Thursday, I marched down the road. I was a little dismayed to see a line outside the door already! Our savior arrived on the ferry and had SIM cards for all! Alas, she had left the keys to the office in Marsh Harbour. The keys would be put on the next ferry and arrive at 11AM. I went back to Donny's dryer just in time to remove my own clothes. Back to the boat to stare for a while. Then, into the dinghy, back to the dock, walk up the hill. A group of hot people in various stages of despair are loitering and hacking at their cell phones with screwdrivers while mumbling "she said I had to unlock my phone, what does that mean?" Keys have been delayed until the 12:00PM ferry.
A general grumbling of dissatisfaction rumbles in our small, Instagram-less community. Paperwork is produced from a back room and I write in "secret" questions to be keyed into my account. The keys arrive! Salvation is nigh. I'm fourth in line and gleefully produce my credit card to start the account. The credit card machine is down.
Back down the hill, back to the dock, into the dinghy, back to the boat, get cash, back into the dinghy, back to the dock, up the hill. The crowd of loiterers has disbanded. My heart sinks. It's 12:30 and of course, the agent has gone to lunch! Thankfully, she was patiently waiting for me. Within 5 minutes I had a new Bahamian SIM card and could scroll through Instagram to my heart's content, and while even wearing clean clothes! What larks!
6 comments
Oh, the joys of cruising! I'm trying to picture Matt in a velvet jump suit. Can't quite see it, which is probably a good thing.
ReplyDeleteLol! I don't want to think about how long the velvet jump suit would take to dry, on a line, in rain showers that have only popped up because you are drying laundry!
DeleteI thought I longed for photos of the blue hues of Bahamian waters. Matt in his blue velvet jumpsuit will do. As always, you two maka a me laugh!
ReplyDeleteLOL. Now we'll have to actually find a blue velvet jumpsuit. Miss you!
DeleteFor numerous sorts of IoT gadgets that are littler in measure, such as wearables, these SIM frame components are still as well huge to be commonsense. The transcendent frame figure for a mechanical SIM is implanted SIMs, which are specifically mounted and pre-soldered onto the circuit board, as contradicted to sitting as swappable SIM cards in a slot.
ReplyDeleteA data SIM card is a type of SIM card that is specifically designed for data usage on mobile devices. Data SIM cards can be used in any type of device that has a data connection, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and more. Data SIM cards typically come with a data plan that provides a certain amount of data to be used each month. Data SIM Card
ReplyDelete