The Dark Side of Disney (19 page)

However, you can still use this button trick to your advantage by getting the CM to press it for you! If you carry around an old, expired park ticket, when you insert it into the FP machine it’ll spit back out without giving you a FP. These magnetic-strip tickets are easily demagnetized, and the CMs are too frazzled at busy times of the day to troubleshoot why your ticket won’t work properly. So 99% of the time they’ll just push the button for you! Score, free extra FastPass!

Another scam also preys on the volume of people the CMs have to deal with in regards to the FP systems. My friend Keith thought this up:

“I was there for a week one time and hadn’t used a few of my prior days’ FastPasses, and I was still carrying them around in my wallet. I went to Toy Story Mania and got my FP as usual, and then had to come back 45 minutes later. So I just shoved them into my wallet along with the ones from the previous day.

“Well, I showed the first CM the correct FastPass for TSM, and again, shoved it back into my wallet, thinking that was the end of it. But then the second CM later on in the queue wanted to actually collect the ticket, so I pulled it out of my wallet and gave it to her. She didn’t even look at it, just took it from me, and we walked onto the ride.

“It was only when I got back to the resort and started dumping receipts out of my wallet that I realized I’d given her a FP from the previous day, and that the TSM one was still in my wallet!

“The possibilities for scamming seemed pretty vast once I realized that the second CM, the one who actually takes the tickets from you, doesn’t check them. It’s only the first CM at the beginning of the queue who checks them. So in theory you could collect a bunch of FPs from rides with no lines, and only one for a high-volume ride, and reuse the high-volume one to get on that really popular ride over and over throughout the day.

“I tried this out by getting a FP early on for Space Mountain. Before I rode Space Mountain each time I’d get a FP for Mickey’s Philharmagic. I ended up keeping the 10AM Space Mountain FP I got and reusing that all day long, getting another FP from Mickey’s Philharmagic each time I wanted to ride Space Mountain. By the middle of the day the Space Mountain FPs were totally gone, but I was able to keep going on it because I kept using the same 10AM pass over and over.

“Or you could even use the low-volume ones the next day, as I did by mistake. Assuming you’re only going on low-volume rides you can collect upwards of 7-8 FPs throughout the day and use them all the following day after getting a single FP at the ride you want to go on over and over!”

I’ve also seen people selling FastPasses for Toy Story Mania later in the afternoon, when all of the FPs are gone for the day. People are standing there scalping them for $10 each, assumably already having gone on the ride a few times earlier in the day, and guests are flocking to buy them! If you have a family of 5 and can sell your FPs for $10 each you’ve almost paid for a park ticket. The passes do say “non-transferable” on them so technically this is illegal, but probably such a minor offense that the CMs won’t enforce it.

Refillable Mugs:

This one is hilarious because it seems to piss so many people off. They get banned from message boards for being frothing-at-the-mouth batshit mad that other people are abusing the system to get free soda. Oh, the horror!

It’s so simple it’s hard to even call it a scam. The resorts all have mugs for sale at an inflated price that can be refilled as often as you want for the length of your stay. Guests will save their mugs and bring them back on their next trip so they can continue to get free refills without paying for another mug. There are accounts of people using 7+ year old mugs that are all worn down and disgusting, instead of simply paying another $12.50 for a new one! On top of that, a quick eBay search reveals that you can even buy someone else’s used, scratched, dirty refillable mug for a fraction of the original cost, or sell yours after a few years and make back a portion of your original “investment”.

As of this writing Disney doesn’t crack down on this scam at all, although recent reports suggest that soon chips might be implanted in the cups, and they’ll have to be scanned at the soda fountains before any soda will dispense. If the info on the chip doesn’t match the date of your stay, no soda for you! However, it seems as if the cost of implementation of this system vs. the savings from cracking down on soda scammers would not balance out, so I think this is a rumor that won’t ever come to fruition, and people will continue to use the same refillable mug for decades to come.

Pin Trading Scams:

Pin trading has got to be the stupidest hobby ever. They’re too small to be very enjoyable from an artistic perspective, they serve no functional purpose, and they’re insanely overpriced. However, the biggest reason for the extreme hate I feel for these pins is that they clog up the auction listings on eBay. If I do a search for Epcot, for example, literally ¾ of the listings will be for pins. So I always have to add –pin –pins to the end of my searches to weed them out.

But that speaks to the popularity of the damn things. And anything popular will eventually become the subject of a scam! This one comes from Tricia, a sweet, innocent-looking Orlando resident with a heart of coal. Her scam isn’t exactly clever, but it is funny because it shows the lengths people are willing to go through to acquire these stupid little pieces of plastic and metal.

“I go to the parks every weekend, and after seeing how crazy people go over pin trading I realized it was ripe for exploitation.

“So I did some research and found that ‘Hidden Mickey’ pins were both popular and somewhat rare. So I bought the cheapest, most generic set of pins I could find off of eBay, and then went around one day at Epcot and traded each of those pins with Cast Members for Hidden Mickey pins. At this point I’m out $12 and a day of my time.

“The next day I go back to Epcot, knowing that all of the Hidden Mickey pins are gone from the CMs lanyards. So people are getting desperate trying to complete their collection by the end of their trip, but aren’t having any luck with the CMs. I, on the other hand, am displaying said pins prominently on my lanyard and proceed to stand near one of the many pin-selling carts or stores. One by one people come up to me, asking if they can trade for one of my Hidden Mickey pins. I pretend to look hard at their lanyard and then tell them that they don’t have anything I want.

“’However,’ I’ll say, ‘I would like some of those pins from the new such-and-such set. If you buy four of them for me I’ll definitely trade those for this here Hidden Mickey pin you want so badly.’

“So they freak out and rush over and buy the pins, and I nonchalantly ask if I can have the receipt for my collection to show when and where I got specific pins. They always hand over the receipt, and I hand them the Hidden Mickey pin, and they’re thrilled even through they’ve just spent at least $15 on a little piece of junk.

“And the punch line, of course, is that I immediately return the pins to the pin cart or store for cash, and then move onto the next store/cart and repeat the scam all over again. The following weekend I’ll go to a different park and do the same thing. I can easily clear $300 a day with this scam!”

To add onto Tricia’s story, a fairly recent development is that the Chinese factories that manufacture the pins are not destroying the original molds, but are instead illegally selling them to people who then create thousands of counterfeit “scrappers”, i.e., cheap knock-offs of high-demand pins from those same molds.

If a scammer knows where to look they can get these scrappers for pennies each, and either use those to trade for legitimate pins which they can then sell on eBay, or use them for the above scam, essentially saving themselves the day of trading with CMs.

So far Disney doesn’t seem to give a shit about these counterfeits, and to be honest, some of the copies are so good that I’m not sure how they’d even begin to crack down on them, aside from making CMs take a daylong course on spotting counterfeits, which would just be a ridiculous waste of time and money. Eventually they’ll probably try to crack down on the Chinese factories, but I doubt they’ll have much luck with that, unless they’re legitimately willing to move their business to more reputable factories, which would drive up the cost of pins exponentially.

If you don’t want to get scammed when you’re pin trading, there’s a great site that shows pictures of legit pins:
http://www.pinpics.com
. If you have a Smart Phone with you in the parks it’s relatively easy to search the site for the pin you’re about to receive in trade to see if it’s a scrapper or not. Hopefully they’ll come out with a mobile app soon….

BED BUGS AND OTHER CREEPY CRAWLIES

Bed bugs are pretty nasty little creatures. They feast on your blood at night, leaving huge burning welts that take weeks to heal. And if they follow you home from vacation (usually stowing away in your luggage) it will cost thousands of dollars to get rid of them because the only surefire way to kill bed bugs (aside from DDT, which is illegal) is by roasting them at 128-degrees or higher for more than 30 minutes. Unfortunately bed bug infestations have been on the rise over the past decade in the United States both because of the DDT ban and because of an increase in international travel.

A bedbug doing what it does best… sucking your blood!

There are some precautions you can take to cut down on the chances of being infected by this menace. When you get to your room, don’t immediately start unpacking everything and then jump in the bed for a nap! Leave your luggage right outside the door and have one person go into the room with a small flashlight (the LED ones on key chains work great). Lift up the corners of the mattress and use the flashlight to check the mattress seams and the box spring for little brown or red specs (i.e., blood pooped out by bed bugs). You can also use a sticky-tape lint brush or the reverse side of a maxi-pad to wipe around the headboard, checking for the same brown specks or for actual bugs. If you find signs of the bugs, leave the room immediately and tell the front desk! If you don’t see anything, then enjoy your bed bug free room.

If you do end up getting bitten while on vacation, it’s going to be hard to tell if the bites are bed bugs. Unfortunately, Florida is home to a huge number of bloodsucking insects, so the bites could be fleas, fire ants, mosquitoes, or bed bugs. It could even be a simple heat rash. Luckily each type of bite/rash looks and feels noticeably different, so educate yourself beforehand so you’ll know the difference; there are pictures all over Google Images comparing different types of bites. You’ll also be able to narrow it down because ants and mosquitoes are fairly easy to spot, whereas fleas and bedbugs are smaller and better at hiding. Obviously, if you wake up and have the bites, as opposed to getting them while walking around the parks, chances are better that there are bed bugs in your room.

Finally, it’s becoming more apparent that bed bugs are no longer just coming from beds. They’ve been found in high-class boutique clothing stores in NYC, in the cargo compartments of airplanes, and even in movie theater seats. So unless you plan on never leaving your house and never inviting anyone in to visit, you’re going risk bed bug exposure and there’s nothing you can do about it. So stop worrying and enjoy your vacation, dammit!

But people on Disney web forums refuse to take this advice and just LOVE to freak out about bed bugs. Like, totally apeshit panic attacks that threaten to ruin their vacation before they even leave. And the media isn’t helping, with a different inflammatory story about the little bloodsuckers popping up in major publications every week or so. However, I contacted a number of people on Disboards who claimed to have been bitten by bed bugs at WDW, and it seems like a lot of these people are just trolls trying to stir up trouble. Only Yolanda, a single mother of two, had a story that sounded legit.

“We were staying at the Alligator Bayou section of Port Orleans Riverside,” begins Yolanda. “I was in a double, my son was in the other double, and my daughter was in a trundle that pulled out from under my son’s bed. The first morning all three of us woke up with painful red bites, which at first I thought were fire ant bites. But then I remembered reading about bed bugs a while ago on Disboards and realized I had totally forgotten to check the beds (won’t make that mistake again!).

“Well, sure enough I found little brown flecks all over the back corners of the mattress, so I started freaking out a little bit! I frantically dragged both kids down to the Concierge Desk and told the gentleman behind the desk, Jerry, what happened. I was trying to be quiet so that the other guests wouldn’t hear me, because I didn’t want to start a panic, but when I showed Jerry the welts on my daughter’s arms he screamed, “Oh no, bed bugs!” like a little girl! LOL!!!

“You would have thought we had Ebola the way they handled everything. First they bought us brand new outfits from the gift shop, made us take off our old clothes and seal them in plastic bags (always wear clean underwear, kids!), shower, and then put on the new clothes. Then they bagged up all of our luggage and anything else we had with us and took it away to be heat-treated, which they said might damage some polyester-based materials. We were also told that the mattresses would be thrown away and that our room would be treated and quarantined for at least a week.