How I Got (Temporarily) Robbed on My Viking Cruise

Buckle up everybody because this is a ride.

After my day out in Roatan, we decided to go to the spa which we’ve talked about before, check it out at this link. 

There is a row of about twelve lockers in the locker room. It’s two rows stacked on top of one another. I decided to use locker number two.

When you go in if a locker is empty, it’s open. There is a folded up towel and a robe in there. There’s also a drawer in each locker and in the drawer, there’s a pair of rubber shower shoes that you can wear. Also in that little drawer, there’s a box where you can put your small items. So I had worn my swimsuit down and over top of it I had my purple shirt and a wrap skirt. I also had a pair of Crocs and my glasses. 

I took out the towel and the shoes. I put my shirt and my skirt in the top. I put my my Crocs back where the shoes were. And I put my glasses in the little box in the drawer. 

I closed the door. You lock it with the key card from your room.

When I came back from my time in the spa, I walked in and I opened the locker with my key card. It unlocked. 

But when I opened the door, all I was looking at was a folded up towel. 

What should have been in there was all my stuff and the folded up robe that I didn’t use. I was shocked. I just stared at it for a second because my mind absolutely did not compute this reality. So, the first thing I thought was that I had gone to the wrong locker. 

About half of the lockers were open and not in use. So I can see automatically that my clothes weren’t in those. I took my key card and I tried to open all the rest of the closed lockers. 

My card didn’t open any of them. 

So then I’m standing there just flabbergasted and I’m starting to doubt myself at this point. 

The locker room attendant came around the corner at that point and sort of stared at me. 

We’ll call her Katie, that’s not her name, but we’ll call her Katie. She becomes one of my favorite people on Earth although I think she was scared of me. She stared at me for the rest of the entire cruise like you would side-eye a wild animal. 

She asked me what was wrong. 

I said that my clothes weren’t there. 

Now, I’m a person that doesn’t like conflict, and I go out of my way to not bother anybody in customer service. So it really entertains me when people have to use their customer service voice on me and Katie really used her customer service voice on me because she was standing there looking at a dripping wet middle-aged white woman telling her that her clothes had gone missing. Obviously, I was a crazy person. 

She asked me what locker I used. I said it was locker two. I had unlocked it. My clothes weren’t there. 

She took my key card gently like you would take it from a grizzly bear. 

She said, let’s try all the other lockers. I said “Okay I tried that but go ahead.” 

She tried to unlock all the other lockers. She seemed really confident until she got to the end of the lockers and realized that nothing would unlock with my key. 

Her confidence sort of waned a little bit there. But then she decided that she was going to go get a master key. Obviously my clothes are in another locker. My key just wasn’t working. We were both pretending that my key did not unlock that empty locker. That reality was still not making sense.

She went and she had to get a master key from a distant desk. It was not in the spa area, she had to go get it from somewhere. 

She came back. 

And she opened up all the locked lockers and with each one she gave sort of a little bit of a ta-da move with her hands. And I would say “No. Those aren’t my clothes.”

By the time she got to the last one, she was crestfallen.

She’s said, “What are your clothes?” I described to her what my clothes were. She was really confused now. She kept whispering, “This has never happened. I don’t know what to do.” Then she said, “Okay, why don’t you go talk to my boss at Guest Services and report this because I don’t know what to do.”

At this point I’m like completely doubting myself. I’m thinking did I walk down here stark naked? No I had to have been wearing clothes over my bathing suit, shoes, and my glasses. All right, so I borrowed a robe and some shoes from one of the open lockers and went back to my room. 

At this point I find my husband again. I tell him what happened and he confirmed that I was not crazy. I did not walk down there stark naked. Yes, I had all my stuff. I changed my clothes back in the room. We went down to guest services and reported to them that all my stuff got taken from the locker room. They again used their customer service voice. I was obviously a crazy woman. I described in detail. I mean, look at my shoes. 

Those are beautifully bedazzled. 

Those are going to be pretty obvious if someone else is wearing them around. I think really my husband would want those shoes to be stolen because he hates them. He doesn’t understand that people stop me on the street to tell me that they love them. They’re awesome. And believe me, I can buy that kit again from Etsy if I need to, to be bedazzling another pair of shoes but they’re obvious. Why would anybody steal this stuff? It wasn’t like I had my phone with me.  

So, I don’t get it. I mean it was just a shirt, a skirt, wonderful shoes, and my glasses.

They were just treating this like I was a crazy person who lost my stuff. 

We go for our afternoon reading time. I don’t need my glasses to function. They’re mostly for distance. I can survive close-up. I also have sunglasses, which are prescription. I can wear them around just to do stuff even though I look a little weird once it was getting darker on the boat. 

After a little bit, the husband has been thinking about this. And his Spidey senses are starting to kick in. He does not have a problem with conflict. He is a native New Yorker, even though we don’t live there anymore, and for a while, he was a detective. He was like, no no, we’re looking more into this. He said he was going to go talk to someone in more authority. I said, “Okay, go do that.” Because as we all remember, he’s already been throwing a fit because we missed the Panama Canal on this cruise. He’s also had fits on previous cruises. I always say this man has a file with the company. Y’all go on without me. He goes away. 

He comes back after a little bit. I said, “Did you cause a ruckus?” He says, yes. He said he talked to the general manager. He said she didn’t want to talk to him. She said she was busy. So he just stepped back and said, in a very loud voice. “Fine. I was just trying to tell you, we were robbed on your boat.” He said that got her attention. She came and talked to him. They said that they would look into it. We’re sitting around there about hour and a half, two hours later when someone comes and finds us.

I know somebody’s got a file on us and they’re watching us because they found us where we were and came and got us. “All hands look out for the delusional woman and the loudmouth man because we need to talk to them.”

They said that they had my stuff and it was in a locker in the spa. I said there was no way that my stuff is in a locker in the spa but I want my stuff back so I went to look.

I went down there and they said it’s in locker number six. They tried to open it with my key and it did not open. So they opened it with the master key and yeah all my stuff was in there. 

I know we opened this locker earlier. Katie comes around the corner and I’m staring and she looks at it and she starts pointing. She says, “No, no!”

I said, “Exactly.”

She said, “We opened that. That wasn’t there.”

I said, “Yes, that wasn’t there”. She’s my favorite person in the world. She’s backing me up here. I am not a crazy dripping white woman. 

I don’t know what happened. To this day, we do not have an explanation. Obviously somehow somebody was able to open that locker and take my stuff. Then they brought it all back.

I don’t know. There are two options:

• It was staff who brought it back when people started looking. But nothing I had was worth potentially losing your job over and Katie had to go sign out a key from another part of the ship to open the lockers. She was also genuinely surprised by every turn of events, in my opinion.
• It was a passenger. I think it was a confused passenger. This cruise line runs on the old side and some of the people seemed a bit befuddled. I think there was an issue with the locks and someone opened the wrong locker. They bundled up all the stuff and when they realized it wasn’t theirs later on, they brought it back.

It was so weird. But that’s how I got robbed on Roatan day on a ship in a spa. Let me just say for the rest of the trip every time I went to the spa, I wore my clothes over my bathing suit like I did before. I just took them off inside the spa I put them on a lounger. I didn’t put anything in the locker. I obviously didn’t take my phone or anything important down there.  Whenever Katie saw me she looked like she expected chaos to erupt any second but I didn’t cause any more trouble. The husband went and apologized to the general manager for causing a ruckus. I hope that’s in our official file too.