A voice booms suddenly over the loudspeaker on the Queen Elizabeth 2, interrupting our interview outside on the ship’s sun deck: “Code 2 in Laundry Room. Code 2 in Laundry Room.”

“That means there is water in the Laundry Room,” Beatrice DuMont Muller explains.

Bea Muller, a permanent resident of the Queen Elizabeth 2, relaxes on the ship’s sun deck.

She should know. For the past six-and-a-half years, Muller has been a passenger extraordinaire, living in stateroom 4062 aboard Cunard Line’s venerable QE2. She knows “ship speak.”

Wearing a strawberry blonde wig — “I wear a hat in the daytime and a wig at night” — Muller looks a decade or more younger than her 87 years.

“When you live on the ship you get a year younger every year,” she says.

No matter how appealing cruising might be, most people would have a difficult time envisioning themselves living year after year as a passenger on a cruise ship. But Muller, who stays in touch with family and friends via e-mail in the ship’s computer center, can’t imagine living anywhere else.

Does she ever tire of life aboard the QE2 after all these years?

“Oh no,” she says. “Every time I get annoyed at something I go back into my cabin and realize how bored I would be with no eyesight to drive any longer, no grandchildren — all my grandchildren are the kids who work here. My two sons come and sail with me. I don’t have to cook and shop and clean any longer.

“It’s been a fantastic life for me here.”

Indeed.

A steward makes her bed every morning and turns it down at night. He tidies her cabin twice a day. Chefs prepare her meals. Entertainers perform nightly on the main stage and the ship’s orchestra plays music for ballroom dancing.

And, in addition to all the other amenities of shipboard living, Muller has seen every place in the world that the QE2 sails to — more than once.

Many of the ports are part of the QE2’s annual 108-day world cruise, which in January marks the 25th year the 39-year-old cruise ship has been circling the globe. Leaving January 8, the ship will call at 41 cities in 25 countries on five continents.