"NO--not the building!"

Today I dropped off my two elderly friends at the cruise ship terminal for a trip on the waters of the Atlantic. I don’t actually know their destination, just assume they mostly like riding around on the boat. They have taken many such cruises, so they are veterans of this kind of travel.Everything was a problem on the short trip to the cruise ship—starting with their bags, which were enormous. For nine days at sea, they had packed three large bags that could not be carried. They had to be wheeled around. Getting these bags and a wheelchair and two smaller bags into the car was no easy job. We were given something of a break on the way to the terminal, as a large sign over the highway read—in brightly lit letters—to take another exit than I’d planned to get on the cruise ship. This meant not going through the tunnel, which saved us about two bucks.

At the receiving area for passengers, two men in a little booth gave me baggage tags to put on the bags, making sure that my friends’ cabin number and other identifying information was on them. I showed them to the wife, hoping that she would be pleased with how well I’d done.

“No names! Oh my god, no names!” She was immediately frenzied again, a state that had only abated for a few minutes while I went to get the baggage stickers.
“What will we do? There are no names on the tags!”
I went to borrow the black marker from the two men in the tent, inked their last name on the tags, returned to show my worried friend my handiwork. It turns out there is another passenger on the boat with their last name. How they knew this is beyond me. It is not a common last name—something on the order of Oorskleesnkiwotz. I wasn’t going to redo the name tags. You see, we are speaking in French, these friends and I, and I am not always understanding what they say the first time. Their communications with me are universally urgent, even for things that could not be more mundane, so I am also burdened with the problem of choosing which things to just ignore, and trying to understand the ones that I should pay attention to. I should mention that these bags are distinctive: The color is hot pink, and they are exceedingly large. They are probably visible from the moon.

It came time to drop them off. We got the baggage unloaded, and the wheelchair properly unfolded and set in place. I pointed to the check-in building.
“You have to go in there,” I said.
“No, no! Not the building!”
“You have to go in the building,” I said, more firmly this time.
“We don’t want to go in the building!”
I’d asked the man at the baggage drop-off, which was just opposite the building, and he said there was no getting around it—you had to go into the building.
“You go into the building, then get on the boat,” I said, trying to reassure them.
“We just want to get on the boat; we don’t want to go in there!”
“First the building, then the boat,” I said.
I left them like that, wishing them bon-voyage. The wife, perpetually worried about practically everything, will hopefully get a little enjoyment out of the trip.