The Elves Have Been A Cruising

By the Boiler Room Elves

When it comes to vacations, Boiler Room Elves love touring cruise ship boiler rooms (we tell BossMen these are “fact-gathering missions” so we don’t need to take vacation days!). A week of sun, sleeping in chairs on the Promenade Deck, and eating good food sounds like the perfect escape to Elfin ears. But we don’t get paid enough to cruise too often (we’re saving up for a new turbo-charged sleigh), so we always look for cheap fares. This time, we found a great deal on a Caribbean cruise. So we went.

Alas, day after day, nothing in the way of a boiler room tour materialized in our Daily Cruise Bulletin. Upon gentle inquiries we were told that the behind-the-scenes tours had come to a halt after 9/11, and we had to settle for the captain's talk and slide show in which he included pictures of the bridge, the ship in dry-dock, divers examining the bottom of the ship, and yes, even the boilers. Another fun thing ruined by terrorism.

Sadly, slide shows just cannot compete with the feel of real nuts and bolts under green felt shoes, so we headed to the buffet to eat away our sorrows. In addition to the normal dining room, this ship had a self-serve buffet where most people ate breakfast and lunch every day. We found ourselves shocked at the behavior of many of our fellow passengers. People would load up their plates with all sorts of food, eat part of it and then dump the rest, only to return to the buffet and come back with more plates full of food. The dessert station was among the worst - it would have 10 types of cookies and cakes, and people would take one of each. They would try one bite of some of the things and trash the rest.

Certainly, none of these passengers ate like this at home, where they were paying the bills. But given free reign and an "I paid for it!" mentality, people freely wasted food and took things they didn't need or maybe didn't even want. There was often a slightly desperate feeling in the air that someone else was going to clean out a tray and you wouldn't get your "fair share."

We met one “gentleman” who was lamenting how the quality of the food had gone dramatically downhill since he started cruising 10 years ago. He lambasted the cruise line, while he was in the process of abandoning a fresh hamburger and fries, after only a few bites. It would join the other two plates of uneaten food sitting at his side, waiting to be cleared. We refrained from asking if he'd considered that perhaps the cruise line could afford to keep the quality higher if every passenger didn't waste enough food for 10 people...

Now, don't get me wrong, we Elves certainly ate more than we needed to. At home, breakfast usually consists of a bowl of Ho-ho-ho-ios, some milk, and a banana. On the ship, we indulged in large amounts of pineapple, cantaloupe, an omelet, bacon, and hash browns, all topped off with a cherry danish or cinnamon roll. But we ate what we took, and if we wanted to try something we weren't sure we'd like, we took a bite or two, knowing we could always return for more.

All this got our Elf minds thinking. Instead of a buffet filled with food, imagine one filled with health care. Having paid the entry fee to get on board, won’t people demand every test ever created at the slightest sensation of pain? Why wouldn’t you get tested for everything if it doesn’t cost you anything? “Let’s run an MRI, how about a CAT scan, how about that Jingle-titis test?” (Editor’s Note: Jingle-titis is a disease that happens only to Elves over the age of 70 who live in Guam.) Won’t people demand medications upon the slightest whim or whenever they see advertising for it? Won’t medical necessity go out the window? Even relatively responsible people will be hard-pressed to avoid the "free" smorgasbord of well-being check ups, no matter how unnecessary they might be at the time.

Where will this lead? Like hamburger-man complaining how quality has dropped, the "cruise line" will not be able to offer high-quality health care to everyone for long. They will have to cut back on the variety of offerings, the quality itself, and the level of service that goes along with it.

Don't get the wrong idea, we Elves really enjoyed our cruise, and we returned to the Boiler Room well-rested and eager to work. But it was also a good opportunity to observe human nature. We simply can't have it both ways - cheap fares and all-you-want, great food and services do not go hand-in-hand. Something has to give. The cruise lines are giving way on the food quality - is that what we want for health care, too?