The television on Royal Caribbean cruise ships has a channel that shows a mix of onboard safety and procedure videos and dramas about teenagers finding very chaste love on a cruise.
Some of the videos drive home messages that the cruise line wants passengers to embrace, like washing your hands. A lot of the videos cover basic safety or share things you might need to know like rules for kids wearing wristbands.
The actual content varies by cruise line, but Carnival Cruise Line (CCL) and Royal Caribbean (RCL) both have similar goals.
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They want to keep passengers safe and stop them from doing things wrong that might not be wrong on land. For example, you can't dry clothes on your balcony, light a candle, or smoke in your room, even if you have a balcony.
But the best of these videos may be on Royal Caribbean ships, where a video unofficially titled "Please Don't Flush" repeats that phrase while showing you what not to flush down the toilet.
You would think people would know that diapers and banana peels should not be flushed down the toilet. But you would be wrong.
And while some other items in the video also seem fairly obvious, two things that are flushable at home can't be flushed on cruise ships -- wipes and non-cruise-ship toilet paper.
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Some passengers know that cruise lines don't offer the most plush toilet paper, so they bring their own. That's a really bad idea, and Carnival Brand Ambassador John Heald recently addressed it on his Facebook page.
"Yep, Luigi and all our plumbers hate people who bring their own toilet paper and those sodding Wet Wipes," he wrote. "That is because despite the signs that plead with you not to flush them down the suction toilet system, they still do.
"And this results in Luigi having to put on the long glove and shoving his arm up a pipe full of the devils dumplings so that the toilets in that cabin section will start flushing again."
Heald made clear that the problem was much bigger than clogging your toilet at home.
"Remember, you don’t just block your toilet but many others in your cabin section," he noted.
Wet wipes are also something you can sometimes flush at home -- depending on the brand and your specific sewer/septic situation -- but can't flush on a cruise ship.
"These days there are wet wipes for babies, wet wipes for adult bottoms whose arse cheeks are far too sensitive to use toilet paper. There are wet wipes that smell of lemon, or lavender, or vanilla or Chanel number 7. The world it seems has gone crazy for wet wipes, and the wet wipes are breaking our toilet system," he added.
The cruise line and its rivals do offer a method of disposing of bathroom items that can't be flushed down the toilet.
"Please then, on behalf of Luigi the Plumber, can I ask you not to put these into the toilet and flush. If you use them for any reason, drop them in the sanitary bags and let your stateroom attendant know and he or she will dispose of them," he said.
