When I worked for NCL America on the Pride of America we were getting ready to make way out of the dry dock in Bremerhaven and taking on all sorts of company big wigs. Me and another guy were on the bullshit task of sweeping the entire cargo hallway or whatever it’s called (big hallway that went from the fire to aft of the ship to make moving goods brought on board easier) and a bunch of dudes in business suits come onboard. One of them starts talking to us while they were all waiting for the porters and grabs a broom to help for a while.

The porters come and take everyone to their cabins, dude helping us sweep apologizes and takes off with the others. Immediately after he leaves the area, our direct supervisor runs over yelling at us. “What’s your problem? Why are you making the CEO do your jobs?!” To which we had to explain he just started doing it himself, but also we were kinda shocked that guy was the CEO of the entire company.

My direct supervisor was kind of an ass. But the captain of the ship was cool and so was the CEO.

I’m a really shy person and tend to keep to myself but my boss at a startup I worked at once was an extremely friendly guy and got me to come out of my shell. He and his family are still my good friends now, a decade later. They’re my role models for what the family I would create should be. Once or twice a year, I take a week off and stay at their house. (It doesn’t hurt that they live near the beach in Florida now.)

I still introduce him as the guy who fired me :)

I put my degree on hold because I just couldn’t summon the motivation at the time to finish. 2 subjects shy of graduating.

FF 8 years later and my then current boss asks about it, I said I’d never finished it because reasons. He offers to help pay for any subjects I need to take to complete. It turns out if I’d left it on hold for any longer I would have forfeited the whole thing.

He not only paid the money for me to finish those last two subjects; once I graduated he bumped my pay substantially because now he had a university-educated staff member on the books.

When I first came to the USA I obviously did not have an EAD (employment authorization document) which would make it legal for me to work. I started to work at this place as a non-paid intern. 6 months later I got my EAD and I found out that the owner literally logged my hours without my knowledge and paid me a bonus for the last 6 months. He was an Egyptian immigrant and he said he knew how difficult it was. I owe a lot to that guy.

My current manager is the best boss I’ve ever had so far. He doesn’t micromanage and he lets his team be as long as we do our jobs. He also approves almost anything we want to do as long as it’s reasonable. Lastly, he fully supported me to be relocated (which is hard to get approved and very expensive), which basically changed my life.