A week later I had a flight to Florida to get murdered or have the job of a lifetime.
- erika
- Jul 6
- 4 min read
I applied to a sketchy job posting on a Tuesday. By the following week I was boarding a ship in Florida with strangers. This is that story. Mostly.
I was in the college theater sorting through costume stock when I found the job posting.
I had been applying to everything. A thousand jobs, give or take. Interviews that went nowhere. Opportunities that evaporated. The particular exhaustion of being a new graduate with real skills and no way to prove them to anyone who hadn't watched you work. I was cleaning and organizing and quietly losing my mind, one inventory spreadsheet at a time.
And then there it was. On Indeed. A listing so vague it was almost insulting.
Seamstress. Major cruise line.
That was it. No company name. No details. No description of the role or the requirements or what "major cruise line" even meant. Just those four words and a button that said Apply.
Twelve hours later my phone rang.
A week after that I had a request to fill out paperwork and information for a flight to Florida.
I sat with that email for a moment; because did that mean I had the job? Was this an interview? Was I about to fly to Florida and meet someone in a parking lot and never be seen again? I genuinely could not tell.
I replied asking for clarification.
The answer paraphrased: yes, you have the job, you need to be in Florida in a week.
I had to quit the stock job. Which sounds simple. It was not simple.
The costume professor had gone to real lengths to get me that position. She had advocated for me, vouched for me, made calls on my behalf. She believed in what I was doing and she wanted to see me land somewhere good. And I walked into her office and told her I was leaving in a week to board a ship in Florida for a job I found on Indeed with no company name attached.
I could see it on her face. The worry. The confusion. Maybe a little hurt.
I understood it. I also could not stay. Some decisions you make before you fully understand them, you just know the direction and you go.
I moved back home. Packed what I could. Flew to Florida.
"I landed in Florida and found a group of people I had never met in a hotel I had never been to, all of us about to board a ship together for the first time. This was either the beginning of something extraordinary or the opening scene of a crime documentary. Possibly both."
We stood around making careful small talk the way you do when you are all equally uncertain and equally committed. Nobody wanted to be the first person to admit they had googled whether this was a scam. I definitely had. Multiple times.
And then we boarded the ship.
I want to tell you that the moment I stepped on board everything clicked into place. That I looked out at the ocean and knew instantly that I had made the right call. That it was cinematic and obvious and exactly what I had always imagined.
That is not what happened.
The ship was a disaster. Honestly. From nearly the first moment.
I had been told I would have my own room. I did not have my own room. I had a roommate. Which fine, adjustments happen, people adapt. Except my roommate was, to put it diplomatically, a lot. She made choices. Significant ones. The kind that have consequences. And because I was in the room, her consequences had a way of becoming my problem.
I sat in that room being questioned and thought about the costume professor's face when I told her I was leaving. About the sketchy Indeed posting. About the hotel full of strangers in Florida. About every single decision that had led me to this precise moment on this particular ship being asked to account for things I had absolutely nothing to do with.
And I thought well. This is a choice I made. I am going to have to see it through.
That first ship was hard. Really hard. Not the murder documentary I had half-joked about but genuinely, consistently, chaotically difficult in ways I was not prepared for.
And I stayed. And I learned. And I went back for another contract. And another. And somewhere in all of it the ocean stopped being terrifying and started being home. The work stopped being uncertain and started being mine. The life I had leapt toward without fully seeing it came into focus.
Forty-five countries. Forty-two states. Nine years of this. A career built stitch by stitch on ships I almost didn't board.
All of it started with four words on a job posting and a button that said Apply.
The full story of that first ship — the roommate, the chaos, the ship jail, all of it — is something I am saving. There is more to it than fits here. Considerably more. The kind of more that deserves its own pages and its own time.
The book will tell you the rest.
Come as you are. Explore as we go.
— Erika
Founder, ELE · Sewist · Ship person · Survivor of the first contract
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