Reply To: Ideas for helping new cruisers acclimate?
(forum admin hat on, clouds of dust and furious coughing)
Longstanding policy (though I defer to @chicazul / @paulandstorm / any other mod who’s actually not been AWOL for a year) has been to shy away from deleting threads, barring inadvertent double-post, offensive conduct, or other caprice of the forum mod. (I won’t say I’ve never deleted a thread, but if I ever have, I hope I’ve been adequately transparent about it.) Where appropriate, there’s usually been a soft redirect (thanks for that, @villicious!) to another relevant thread where the conversation could continue.
That said, personally speaking, I see the merit in a separate post-mortem for JCCC4 to go alongside the prae-morte planning threads. Also, there’s way too much good content in this thread already by this point to talk about merging anything 🙂
(admin hat off, hair full of dust bunnies)
I was a new Sea Monkey this time! I’ve been in the weird place all week of being a longtimer in this particular community while a total cruise newbie who’s not been on Twitter or Facebook (or, let’s be honest, this forum, recently), so I oscillated between feeling I knew a lot of people and scarcely anybody. I won’t pretend my experience is typical. Assorted thoughts:
- I’ll leave Sea Monkey Ambassador comments in the thread about same. Overall my impression was positive, but more on that when I’ve written it!
- Really my problem was that the cruise was too short! It took me a few days to get into the swing of things, to feel comfortable enough to initiate conversations, to know enough people to where I could find someone familiar to talk with in a crowd. I am, needless to say, no extrovert, and I was never going to meet everyone on board, but I feel like if the cruise had gone eight days, I’d have come a lot closer.
It’s just that I met so many people in such a short amount of time that it was hard to keep everyone straight in my mind (#humblebrag), and so I kept worrying I’d offend somebody by forgetting details from some previous conversation. Never mind that I’m myself nondescript enough that other people almost certainly did the same thing to me without my realizing or minding.
- Speed Meeting was awesome — thanks, @Thalandor46 and everyone else who helped organize it! It was great to speedmeet @fizzgig and others whose handles I don’t know. I can’t claim I made much of an impression on anyone in the allotted time, but I feel like it really started paying dividends later on, the second or third time I encountered someone. Yet again, there would’ve presumably been more such repeat encounters if the cruise had gone longer…
- I think I could’ve benefited from an optional mini-orientation; everything sorta trickled in over the course of the cruise, but it might’ve been useful up front. Actually, everything in the Primer looks pretty great, @Thalandor46 — maybe all I’m looking for in an “orientation session” is someone to read the relevant bits to me in a soothing voice (also to get a chance to look around the room at all the other new people).
- First cocktail party was a little “Big Bad World One”-themed for me; random insecurities made it seem like everyone was already friends with everyone else and I was intruding. It was useful mostly as a bookend to the last cocktail party, where I also wandered aimlessly but actually also talked with people, which is some sort of sign of progress I guess.
I’m not sure how to make the first cocktail party better, though — it really is the first chance for a lot of returners to catch up with old friends, and I don’t know how great I’d feel about asking anyone, even Ambassadors, to give that up and engage with newbies instead. (Also, personally, I am not a loud talker, so it’s hard to make small talk in a loud environment.)
- CruiseMonkey and (especially) Twit-arr were really amazing at helping me feel a little more included in stuff. For the first couple of days, I felt I didn’t know what everyone else was doing when there wasn’t anything scheduled — by the end of it, there were so many things I wanted to do (especially ones spontaneously organized on Twit-arr like
starcloudgazing) that I could hardly keep up. - Also, this won’t help anyone else probably, but I definitely did open-mic as a gambit to give people some point of reference for talking to me — @Thalandor46 joked at one point that I must’ve done it just to make sure he recognized me, which was actually considerably accurate. Of course, I was too busy freaking out before/during/after to actually keep up conversation with anyone who came up to chat with me.
- (Along those lines, though, I wonder if it’d be useful to have a little sticker or something where you could optionally suggest some subjects for people to talk with you about — not to limit conversations, of course, but maybe to start them off. Also, I love our badges this year and look forward to actually legible ones in the future.)