Written by Melvin Bosso,
I was forty years old when I finally admitted to myself that the sea had become my only consistent address. Somewhere between Santiago de Chile and Vancouver, three days into a long cruise contract and twelve years into my life as a marine engineer, I opened a blank document in my cabin and wrote the first sentence of what I decided would be my memoir. The engines hummed beneath my feet, a familiar vibration that had followed me from the Indian Ocean to the North Atlantic, from container vessels to passenger ferries and now this floating city of a cruise ship. I wanted to understand why the same steel, the same flag, the same company could feel like a different world to every person who walked up the gangway.
My name is Lucia Radebe. I grew up far from any ocean, in a dry suburb where the loudest sound at night was barking dogs and distant traffic. At eighteen, I saw the sea for the first time on a class trip and felt something quiet but decisive click into place. Years later, I would graduate into a profession that still surprises people when I introduce myself: marine engineer. I started as a 4th Engineer in late 2018, eager and slightly terrified, responsible for machinery that could not afford to fail in the middle of nowhere. I learned to read the language of pressure gauges and vibration, to listen to engines the way other people listen to gossip. Over time I moved through roles: from 4th to 3rd Engineer on large vessels, then to contracts with passenger and cargo operators, and finally into a role with a Canadian shipping company that felt like a new chapter I had secretly been working toward for a decade.
The titles on my résumé, 4th Engineer, 3rd Engineer, Marine Engineer, look linear and neat. The reality underneath them is anything but. Each promotion was not just a new rank or pay scale; it was a new culture. New captain, new chief engineer, new crew mix, new unwritten rules about who could joke with whom, when it was acceptable to challenge an instruction, whether a mistake would be treated as a lesson or a verdict. On paper, they were “the same company” or “the same industry.” In my body, they were different universes.
Early on, I noticed something that took me years to name: no two people were ever serving on the same ship, even when we were literally on the same ship.
I learned this from a 2nd Engineer on one of my first deep-sea assignments. He had joined the company almost a decade before me, when the fleet was smaller and the founder’s name still meant something personal rather than legal. For him, the company was a family that had grown too fast and lost its warmth. For me, joining in the middle of an efficiency drive, it was a stern, procedure-obsessed organization trying to clean up after some invisible mess that had happened before I arrived. We signed the same safety policies, wore the same overalls, and saluted the same flag, but we were not living in the same story.
When you join an organization, you inherit a story that has been told long before you. The trick is: whose version of that story reaches you first?
On that early voyage, my first impression of “how things are done here” did not come from the company manual. It came from a fellow 4th Engineer who had been onboard six months longer than I had. He met me at the gangway, grabbed one of my bags, and briefed me before we even reached my cabin.
“Listen,” he said, “you’ll like the chief. Fair guy. But don’t contradict him in front of the captain. And if the 1st Engineer is in a bad mood, just stay in the purifier room until it passes.”
By the time I reported for duty, I already carried his version of the culture, his angles of resentment, his grudges, his loyalties. Later, the chief engineer, a man who had survived three company restructurings, gave me his version: stories of ships sold off, benefits trimmed, captains rotated with no explanation. For him, the company was a fragile promise that he had managed to keep alive through sheer stubbornness. For the young cadets, who joined after a spree of recruitment campaigns with polished videos and diversity pledges, the same company was a hopeful first chapter. We were all sailing under the same logo but living in completely different worlds.
People talk about company culture as if it were a single climate, fixed at the organizational level, measurable and comparable. In reality, culture behaves more like weather inside a house with many rooms and many windows: what you feel depends entirely on where you’re standing and who opened or closed which doors before you arrived. Just as no siblings grow up in the same house, no employees experience the same organization. The eldest remembers the parents before the financial crisis; the youngest grows up in a world of careful budgets and early sleep. The middle child is born into tension and unspoken history, learning to interpret tone more than words.
On ships, I have seen the same dynamic repeat itself cabin by cabin, watch by watch.
Take what I’ve come to think of as the “birth order of employment.” Your entry point determines almost everything about the company you think you joined. The founding crew on a new vessel, the ones who do the maiden voyage, who figure out which pipe screams at which RPM, who fight with the shipyard defects and sleep in half-finished cabins, they live in a story of creation. They remember when there were twelve of them, names known, histories shared, arguments that felt like family arguments. They talk about “back when we started” the way some people talk about village life before the city swallowed everything.
Then, a year later, the company “stabilizes operations.” A new batch of officers joins when there are already two hundred people on the crew list. They arrive into a world of routines and shorthand phrases that everyone else seems to understand. Their experience of the same company is not birth; it is adoption. They are told to “fit into the culture” without ever seeing how that culture came to be, which compromises and accidents and confrontations carved its shape.
I once joined a vessel that had just been reassigned after a major corporate acquisition. For the chief engineer, who had built the original team from scratch, this was the end of a story, his story, even as it was the beginning of mine. Watching him walk through the engine room that first week, I understood what it means to inhabit a fundamentally different company from the one your colleagues think they know.
“You’re lucky,” one of the older motormen told me. “You’re joining now, when things are improving.”
Later that night, a younger oiler shook his head at the same idea.
“You’re unlucky,” he said. “You missed the good days. Before they started talking cost control every second sentence.”
Two people, both sincere, both describing what they had actually lived, and both wrong and right at the same time.
Executives often believe that they are “actively improving culture.” I have met captains and fleet managers who were honestly convinced that their fleets were warmer, safer, more open than ever before. Some of them had fought hard for better rotations, more transparent promotion criteria, upgraded cabins. From their vantage point, the trend line was clear and positive. And yet, when you sit with the junior crew in the mess room, you hear a different story. Many of them will tell you that things feel tighter, more punitive, less human.
Some research I read once, during a rare stretch of decent internet at sea, stayed in my mind for years. It said that a large majority of executives, more than four out of five, believe their organizations are actively improving their culture, while barely half of employees agree. The gap is not just about optimism or cynicism. It is shaped by when and how people entered the organization. A leader who joined during a turnaround and now sees stability will feel grateful and proud. A new hire who joins during a profitability drive, with constant reminders about fuel optimization and headcount, might experience the same period as tense and unforgiving.
On ships, “economic and strategic context” isn’t a slide in a presentation. It is the question of whether we are sailing full or half-empty, whether the dry-dock is being delayed again, whether rumors of selling the vessel feel like jokes or prophecies. Join during a boom, and the company culture tastes like opportunity: training budgets, new routes, promotions for those who raise their hands. Join during a cost-cutting phase, and the same company tastes like scarcity: frozen ranks, “do more with less,” a subtle pressure not to complain about fatigue.
I remember moving from one employer to another in the span of a single northern spring. I left a role where the company was in the middle of expansion, new ships, new routes, a sense of ambition, and joined an operator that had just come out of a bruising restructuring. On my second day of the new contract, a senior officer told me, “We’re in survival mode here. Just keep your head down and don’t make noise.” The uniforms were crisp, the safety posters inspirational, but beneath that surface, the emotional culture was shaped by loss. The same job title, marine engineer, carried completely different emotional weight in those two contexts.
In my first years at sea, I assumed culture was something “they” designed and “we” endured. “They”, the shore office, the executives, the board, decided what kind of company this would be; “we” experienced it like weather, bringing a jacket or not, complaining or coping. It took me a long time to realize that each of us, in small, almost invisible ways, shapes the climate that others will later call “the culture.”
Think of the colleague who meets you at the gangway and decides what to tell you first. Think of the senior engineer who either laughs off your question or takes it seriously. Think of the way you respond when a cadet makes a mistake, whether you humiliate them or treat it as a shared learning moment. Each of those micro-interactions becomes someone else’s story about “how things are done here.”
On one ship, I served under a chief who had a habit of making a big deal about every error. He believed this was how you ensured discipline. The result was an atmosphere of quiet fear: people double-checked their work, yes, but they also hid small issues longer than they should, afraid of being the next public example. That was the culture I thought I had joined. Then one day, during a crew change, a new 2nd Engineer came aboard. Within a week, I noticed that he never raised his voice, even when he had every reason to. He documented, he corrected, he followed up, but he did it calmly, respectfully. After a month, the junior crew started going to him directly when things looked suspicious, long before they would have dared tell the chief.
The company had not issued a memo announcing a new culture. Nothing on paper changed. But my day-to-day reality, my experience of “this company”, shifted because one person chose to behave differently in a position that mattered to me. He became my reference point, my internal example of what “good” looked like. Years later, I realized that I had brought some of his habits with me to other vessels. His way of doing things had smuggled itself into other cultures through me.
We talk about culture as if it were abstract, but on a ship it is always embodied. It is the night-shift handover that either blames or collaborates. It is the chief engineer who either eats with the crew once in a while or never leaves the officer’s mess. It is the story you tell a new hire about why the last chief left. It is the decision to intervene when someone makes a rude joke in the control room, or to laugh along and pretend it was harmless.
In my current role with a Canadian operator, sailing routes that connect remote communities and busy ports, I find myself in a strange position. I am no longer the youngest or the newest. On some ships, I am the one who “remembers how things were” before the last policy change, the last fleet reshuffle. Junior engineers ask me, “So, is this company good?” and I can hear, in their question, all the versions of the company they might inherit from my answer.
If I tell them about the time management backed a safety decision even though it cost us schedule and revenue, they will join a company that values integrity. If I tell them about a frustrating rotation change that felt unfair, they will join a company that is careless with its people. Both stories are true. The culture they experience will be shaped not only by what actually happens but by which stories they hear first, and from whom.
Writing this on a cruise from Santiago to Vancouver, I am surrounded by yet another layer of culture: passengers in holiday mode, hospitality staff running a parallel universe of service rituals and smiles, deck officers managing weather and schedules, engine teams focused on reliability and fuel efficiency. To a guest, this is one world: the brand, the décor, the entertainment. To the people working below deck, it is many worlds stacked on top of each other like the decks themselves. A bartender and a motorman wearing the same company badge can live in entirely different psychological climates.
And yet, amid all this subjectivity, there is something steady that I have learned to hold on to: my own responsibility. I cannot control the strategic context, whether the company is in growth or consolidation, innovation or austerity. I cannot control when I joined relative to acquisitions, restructurings, or leadership changes. But I can control how I show up in the microclimate that surrounds me: the watch I lead, the conversations I have, the tone I bring to crisis.
Over the years, I have adopted a quiet practice. On every new ship, after the first hectic days of handovers and safety briefings, I pick one person, usually a junior engineer or cadet, and ask them privately, “How does this place feel to you?” Not “What do you think of the company?” but “How does it feel?” Their answer is usually a mix of adjectives, tense, supportive, distant, friendly, chaotic, professional. I carry that answer with me like a calibration mark. Then I ask myself: “In the small circle of people who interact with me, what do I want that word to be?”
Maybe I cannot fix the whole “culture” of an organization that spans countries and time zones. But I can make sure that, for the people who work with me, the story they someday tell, to a new hire at the gangway, to a friend considering a contract, to themselves in a quiet cabin writing a memoir, is a little less fearful, a little more dignified.
No two employees experience the same culture within a company. The 40-year-old engineer on a night watch in the Pacific, the 22-year-old cadet seeing the engine room for the first time, the executive in a glass office reading satisfaction scores, each inhabits a different version of the same name on the payslip. That truth can feel destabilizing, as if nothing solid exists. But it also opens a different possibility: if culture is experienced one person at a time, then it is also shaped one person at a time.
Somewhere off the coast of Peru, as the ship hummed steadily toward the next port, I looked at the blank page of my memoir and realized that what I was really trying to write was not just the story of my life at sea. It was the story of all the invisible currents flowing between people who work under the same flag but live in different emotional climates. It was the story of how I, a girl from a landlocked neighborhood who fell in love with the ocean late, had become both a product and a shaper of those currents.
The engines will keep turning, companies will keep restructuring and rebranding, and new crew members will keep walking up the gangway into someone else’s unfinished story. I cannot change that. But I can choose the story they hear when they meet me. And perhaps, when they write their own memoirs someday, they will remember not “the company” in some abstract way, but the few people whose everyday actions made the culture they actually lived.
Leave a Reply