Disaster Doesn't Build Character. It Exposes It.

 

Adrift in the Gulf of Mexico, the most prized possession aboard the Carnival Triumph was a toilet that still flushed. There were not many left.

It had started as a celebration. A group of Kim Dooley's church friends had birthdays falling within a couple of weeks of each other, so they did the sensible thing and booked a weekend cruise out of Galveston. Then, a little after five in the morning, the intercom woke her in her balcony cabin on deck six. "Alpha team to the engine room."

There was smoke. A calm British voice came over the speakers to deliver the news in two parts. The good news was that the fire had been contained. The bad news was that the engine was beyond repair. In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, Kim describes the slow dawning of just how bad an idea it now was to be a passenger on a powerless ship in the middle of the Gulf.

One backup grill still worked. One, for four thousand people. And then the part that made national news: the wastewater system failed. Four thousand passengers went hunting for a toilet that flushed. The crew suggested they use their showers instead and line the trash cans with red biohazard bags. The ship began to list. Sewage seeped into the carpets. People wandered the decks in nothing but Carnival bathrobes, which Kim, for the record, kept. A tugboat eventually arrived to drag them toward Mobile, ninety miles off course, and the whole miserable parade crawled along while conditions got worse by the hour.

You could write this as a horror story. Plenty of people did. What Kim noticed, though, was something else entirely.

Somewhere in the heat and the stench and the absurdity, the passengers stopped waiting to be rescued and started taking care of each other. People shared what little they had. Strangers organized. Parents pooled supplies for the babies. The leadership that mattered did not come booming down from the bridge. It rose up out of ordinary people who looked around, saw the mess, and decided that someone had to do something, so it might as well be them.

She gives the crew their due, too. They kept their humor and their decency through days no training could have prepared them for, smiling through a situation that was nobody's fault and everybody's problem.

That is the quiet thing this whole book keeps circling back to. Disaster does not build character so much as expose it. It strips away the titles and the seating assignments and the loyalty tiers until all that is left is whether you reach for the person beside you. In the dark, in conditions nobody would choose, it turned out most people did.

She still has the robe.

When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience by Kim E. Dooley is available now on Amazon, for anyone who likes their wisdom served with a true story and a good laugh.




Name: Kim Dooley

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