Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations (8 page)

After the parade was over, we had to go back and collect the rope, and then we
slowly
made our way back toward City Hall with it. Technically, after the parade, we were done for the day. Park attendance starts dropping as soon as parade is over, so there was no point for us to be there, since it wasn’t a peak time anymore. We were supposed to go back to City Hall to do odds and ends like restocking stuff and assisting the cast members actually working there. None of us ever wanted to do that. We had been out in the park all day, sweaty, hot and tired, and we just wanted to go sit somewhere and cool off and maybe not get yelled at about nonsense for a little while.

Thankfully, the parade wrapped up around 3:45. We’d stall until 4. Then, we took our slow walk back to City Hall, weaving in and out through the park, ducking into backstage areas here and there for air conditioning, and also so our walk would take longer. We might stop by the Mousekateria and get something else to eat. A few times, we got REALLY brave and actually took the train back to Main Street. Every time we took the train back we were yelled at, but we still did it a few more times. We had already been out in the park all day, walking and in full view of guests. Why couldn’t we take the train back?

We’d make it back around 4:30, and then it was time to clock out and leave. Our work as a Celebrate Greeter was done.

When I started in Guest Relations as a Celebrate Greeter, I assumed I’d be doing it for a week or two. Then I’d be trained to work in City Hall, as a true Guest Relations cast member. That’s what was happening with everyone else brand-new to Guest Relations. They’d spend a week Celebrate Greeting, then get trained, and then once every other week end up back as a Celebrate Greeter. It was a nice rotation system that gave everyone some variety.

Except for me.

After two weeks of Celebrate Greeting, I asked one of the managers when I was going to be trained in City Hall. They looked at me confused, and I had to go, “I’m new, I’m Annie. When can I be trained?” They’d still look confused and say stuff like, “Let me get back to you on that.” No one ever got back to me.

Every week I’d go into the manager’s office and ask, “Can I be trained in City Hall now?” and every week they didn’t have an answer for me. Some were like, “Your training is coming up.” Others were like, “Beginning of next month!” And then there was the one manager who couldn’t remember me at all, and I had to re-introduce myself to him every time we had a conversation.

A month passed, and every single day I went to work as a Celebrate Greeter. I worked Monday though Friday, 8:30am to 5pm. That’s all I did. I stood in random areas of Magic Kingdom and handed out free passes for ice cream whenever I wanted. I watched the parade every single day. I got rained on, and I couldn’t wear any sort of rain protection, and I couldn’t carry an umbrella. After a month, I was ready to be a real cast member again, because as a Celebrate Greeter, I didn’t feel like one.

However, none of the managers had any idea when I would start training. Looking back, I feel like there was actually some sort of glitch with me. Maybe something like, I wasn’t even supposed to be there, and I was just perpetually stuck as a Celebrate Greeter. Part of me started to get worried, since no one knew what to do with me. I had this nagging feeling that I’d wind up back at Great Movie Ride, and that would be the end of my Gust Relations story.

It was clear that I was getting jaded being a Celebrate Greeter every single day. Some days I didn’t want to go out into the park and watch the parade — which I know is a crazy thing to complain about. How dare I complain about going out into Magic Kingdom and watching a parade every day? But when it’s your job, it soon begins to lose its magical luster. It wasn’t anything special to stand in Tomrorrowland after a month. It was just going to work.

My questions about training in the actual Guest Relations position turned into me
begging
to be trained. Still, no manager had any idea about my training, and I was convinced this was the end and I could kiss my Guest Relations position goodbye. I had actually been hired to decorate strollers, not deal with ticketing situations.

So how did I finally get trained? Budget cuts.

After forty five days straight of being a Celebrate Greeter, I woke up one morning to find a new schedule waiting for me that included actual training shifts for City Hall. I went into work that day thanking all the managers about it, but I was told it wasn’t their doing. The VP of Magic Kingdom, who had loved Celebrate Greeting for the past five years, was over it. He didn’t see the need for it anymore and thought it was a waste of money, from a labor standpoint, and also the fact that I was singlehandedly giving out like thirty Mickey ice cream sandwiches a day. So, it was cut. And since that was the only thing I knew how to do so far, it was time to train me in something else.

Training in City Hall spanned four days. It’s done in a progressive schedule, so the first night I was scheduled to close, the next two I’d work mid-day shifts, and the last day opening. I had no idea what to expect. Even though I had technically been in Guest Relations (GR) for two months, I barely knew anyone. I had spent my days out in the park, so even though I wasn’t the newest cast member anymore, I was still very new to everyone else.

I was told to meet my new trainer inside City Hall about fifteen minutes before my shift started. She’d show me how to clock in (I already knew how to do this), where I could store my belongings during the day (I already knew how to do this, too), and then what to do and expect from a normal City Hall shift.

When you walk into Magic Kingdom, the building to your left is City Hall. It houses Guest Relations, obviously, but not many people actually go in there, or need to go in there during the day. My family and I, during our two-dozen trips to the parks over the years, never went into City Hall for anything. We once went into Epcot Guest Relations to make dining reservations, and we once went into Studios Guest Relations to print out boarding passes for our flight home. That was it. I didn’t exactly know what to expect standing behind the counter at City Hall, because I had no first-hand knowledge of it. Did people come in to talk about the parks? Would I be planning vacations for guests? If someone came in to complain, how was I supposed to handle it? I had no idea. This is what training was all about.

I clocked in (so I wouldn’t be late) and then I just stood awkwardly in the Bank Out Room of City Hall. It’s a weird name for a room, but that’s what we called it. The Bank Out Room. Because that’s where Guest Relations cast members went at the end of their shift to tally their money and actually “bank out” for the shift — seeing as how everyone’s got a cash till. Someone once called it the Bank Out Room, and it stuck forever. That’s where I waited.

And I waited and I waited and I waited. Four o’clock came and went. No sign of my trainer. I awkwardly walked over to ask the general teller — get it, because it was the Bank Out Room, and Magic Kingdom Guest Relations (MKGR) was whole-hog for the “bank theme” (and also the general teller had all of the money) — if they had seen my trainer. They had not. They checked the call-in log to see if she had called in. She had not. So I continued to wait.

Right off the Bank Out Room was another room, the VIP Room. It was a tiny Victorian-style room, slightly in shambles because no one had bothered to renovate it over the years. It’s not like the VIP room was high up on the refurbishment list. And since it got used quite often, MKGR couldn’t just close it down for a week, anyway.

Originally, the room was meant to house “VIPs”, but VIPs never used it. Who did? MKGR cast members who wanted to hide for a few minutes, sit down, charge their phones, and not do anything. It was also sometimes used for screaming, irate guests who began to cause a scene in front of other guests. Parade meet and greets occasionally took place in there as well. It was MKGR’s every purpose rumpus room.

I sat down on one of the green couches and waited. And waited. Around 4:30pm, the general teller called out to me, “Whitney said she’s on her way!” Not bothering to tell me where Whitney had been, and how long it would take her to get to me.

Around 4:45, she showed up. She threw open the back door to City Hall with such force, I could hear it bang against the opposite wall. “Where is she?” Whitney barked at whoever was standing in the Bank Out Room at the time.

Someone must have pointed at the VIP room, because moments later Whitney’s head came through the door. “I forgot I was training you. Are you ready?” she asked, not bothering to apologize for being so late, not bothering to ask if I had been mildly traumatized after waiting for an hour, not bothering to do any of the normal things I bet a normal City Hall trainer with do with their trainee at the start of a shift.

I nodded, and followed Whitney out of the room.

I’ll save you the struggle of having to figure this out on your own: Whitney hated me. To this day, I still have no idea
why
Whitney hated me so much. She hadn’t forgotten about training me in City Hall, she purposely decided she didn’t feel like doing it. Someone else told me later that day that Whitney had been down in the Mousekateria enjoying a long lunch and when it came time to start my training shift, she just decided not to do it. Finally, after the general teller called a manager, that manager then called Whitney to ask her why she wasn’t handling her trainee.

I feel like her intent was to scare me away from Guest Relations so I’d wind up leaving my spot and heading back to Great Movie Ride. It was as if Whitney was intentionally sending me into awful situations, not to prepare me for what was to come later, but to terrify me. Most of it worked. The four days I spent with her were hell. But then again, it better prepared me for later.

That first night we didn’t do anything. I was still incredibly eager to get in and learn
everything
. Whitney had her heart set on not teaching me much, and also taking a two-hour lunch break. There were required readings for GR, so she sat me in the break room upstairs with a big binder, told me to read everything cover to cover, and then disappeared for two hours. When she came back, she asked me if I had taken my dinner break, and I was like, “Um, no, you told me to read all of this and also instilled lots of fear in me, so I didn’t take my lunch break.” Whitney rolled her eyes, huffed, and said, “Take it now, I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”

I was supposed to split my training: half out on the counter, half learning things from Whitney through virtual training and walks through the park. I know this is what was supposed to happen because I watched other new GR cast members do it. They looked like they were having fun and learning a lot. Meanwhile, I spent a much of my training sitting alone, in the breakroom, waiting for Whitney to come back.

For Guest Relations, I needed to know everything. Absolutely everything. I needed to know the answer to every single question that a guest might ask, and if I didn’t know the answer, I had to figure out where I could find it. I can only imagine what would have happened to me if I didn’t come to the position with a ton of Disney knowledge. Whitney taught me jackshit.

The next day wasn’t much better, even though I actually got to go out on the counter and interact with guests. As excited as I was, I was also terrified. I was terrified of saying the wrong thing to a guest, and making a situation way worse. Luckily, the first few guests I talked to only wanted things like buttons and dining reservations, and those were easy enough to do. Then, a guest came to me with a ticket question.

I had been through the ticketing ATS training, yes, but sixty days ago. I hadn’t touched ATS since then, so let me be honest, I had forgotten just about everything. The guest handed me their tickets and told me they wanted to upgrade them to park hoppers.

This is a pretty easy thing to do, and something I could still do in my sleep. But on day two, I had no idea how to upgrade tickets to add the park hopper option. I looked to Whitney.

“Do you
not
know how to do this?” she asked like a Disney villain.

“I do, I just don’t want to do it wrong,” I told her. “I haven’t fooled around in ATS since training.”

“You don’t
fool around
in ATS. You do it. Ugh, move over.” She didn’t even give me time to move away from the computer, she hip-pushed me out of the way. She grabbed the tickets from my hand and started scanning them into the computer, so fast I could barely follow. She upgraded the tickets in less than three minutes and handed them back to the family.

“Could you should me how you did that?” I asked, because I genuinely wanted to know.

“Are you paying attention or not, Annie?” she yelled at me so loud everyone on the counter stopped working and looked over in our general direction.

“I am paying attention! I just wanted to see you do it slower so I could follow!”

“You can’t do things slow. You have to do things fast for the guests, because you get them in and out and back into the park. I’m not going to slow down my work habits just so you can keep up with them.”

Was Whitney calling me stupid on the counter in front of guests and other cast members? She sure was. I’m surprised I didn’t cry. That’s not the only time she implied that I was slow, either. She at one point really called me “stupid”, but it was in a backstage location and seemed to be referring to my taste in Disney characters instead. I had a Mr. Incredible backpack, and Whitney looked at it and went, “That’s a little stupid, how old are you?”

The third day wasn’t much better. Once again I’d hesitantly do things, not sure if I was doing them correctly, and Whitney would yell at me for that hesitation. I wasn’t looking to be coddled in this new role, but I was looking for some sort of feedback other than Whitney telling me I was a “moron” (it happened). Other cast members could see that I was clearly not having a good time, so they’d come over and talk to me as soon as Whitney disappeared for a smoke break. She’d leave me alone for hours at a time during this training, and you know what? It was fine. I was better off with no trainer than a trainer intent on ruining my day.