Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations (12 page)

The other guests in City Hall were ones picking up their wristbands for the party. That’s how Magic Kingdom figures out who has and who hasn’t purchased a ticket for the event. Guests would come in, we’d check their ticket, and then issue them a colored wristband that they’d then slide onto their wrist. It was a pretty seamless process, except that sometimes a hundred people would show up at once, and there was no way we could get through everyone in a calm and orderly manner.

So during this crossover time, we had a bunch of angry guests, and then a bunch of impatient guests who wanted to get their wristbands and get out of there.

I was working one of these crossover periods and it was just utter chaos. Guests were cutting other guests in line to get a wristband sooner, and no one was having any fun. I finished up with one guest and beckoned the next guest over.

The guest that approached me was a mother, and I could tell because she looked exhausted. She was also dressed as Cruella de Vil — it was Halloween, after all. She wore a black-and-white dress, with a spotted shawl over her shoulders to create the look of Dalmatians. Her hair was done up in half black, half white, and it sat on the very top of her head. “I like your costume!” I told her, as soon as she was in earshot.

“Thanks,” she mumbled back, dropping her purse down on the counter. Something was clearly wrong.

“What can I help you with tonight?”

“I need party tickets. They’re all sold out!” That’s when Cruella started crying.

For whatever reason, Disney limits the number of tickets sold for any of its special parties. It’s probably to make the party a smaller affair, and make it seem more like a special event. That way things like the Halloween party really can be an awesome night, since it’s about 1/10 of the guests who are normally in the park, and that means shorter lines for rides and for characters.

The downside, though, is that the party nights sell out. Sometimes they sell out quickly, and sometimes they don’t sell out at all. Other times the parties sell out mid-day, so if you enter the Magic Kingdom, go ride some rides, and four hours later decide it’s time to buy party tickets, there might not be any left. There’s nothing Guest Relations can do about that.

“I’m sorry, the tickets are sold out. They sold out a few hours ago. You didn’t buy them ahead of time?” I asked as politely as I could. This woman was already sobbing in front of me, and I didn’t want to make it seem like this was
her
fault.

“We were going to buy them at the hotel a few days ago, but then my daughter got horribly sick. We’ve been spending half days at the park just because she can’t do full days. I feel so bad for my son, he’s only seeing half of Disney!” Cruella told me, now trying to fight back tears. “She wasn’t feeling good today, so we spent all day at the hotel. I finally got her up and dressed, and we’ve been in the park for an hour now, and she wants to stay through the night. But the tickets are sold out!”

Sometimes I just didn’t know what to say to a guest when they were telling me their sad story. All I wanted to do was make it better, but I was always hesitant to cry right along with them. Yes, this was an awful story and it made my heart hurt. “What are they dressed as?” I asked, since it seemed like a simple question.

“My husband is dressed as Jasper, and the kids are Dalmatians. They’re waiting outside. I got into line telling them I was buying tickets, and I don’t want to go back and tell them they’re sold out. This vacation is already ruined for us.” Cruella cried this time, for real. And it’s a weird sight to see a grown woman, dressed as Cruella de Vil, cry in front of you.

I think the second this woman walked up to me I decided what I wanted to do for her. She didn’t know it yet, though. I always felt weird telling guests right away what I was going to do for them, because sometimes they argued with me over it, and sometimes they just thanked me profusely and I wanted to be like, “Once is enough.” Also, I felt that if I told them immediately what I was going to do, they would try to get more out of me. I wasn’t in the mood to play that game today.

I didn’t think this woman was going to take me for all my magic, but she was pretty distraught, and I didn’t want to make her any more distraught. “I’m so sorry. Could I borrow your room key and one of your tickets?” She handed them over, having no idea why.

Cruella managed to compose herself a little bit, and kept semi-whispering to herself that the vacation was ruined and it was the worst. Meanwhile, I frantically opened up her hotel reservation to get her information, so I could punch that into my system and get her some comp tickets to the Halloween party. Yes, it was sold out. However, that didn’t mean I couldn’t give her free tickets.

As I typed away at my computer I started asking the woman questions, like where they were from, how many times they had visited, what her kids enjoyed, the usual stuff. She rattled off answers to me, not fully aware what she was saying. At one point she told me she would “be right back” and hurried out of City Hall to her family on the front steps. I could see them though the front window. Dad wore a grey jacket that had been dirtied up, and a sideways green cap, just like Jasper. I could see a boy and a girl next to him, both dressed in white outfits with black polka dots. They wore headbands with floppy ears.

Cruella came racing back in and apologized for rushing away, but her and her family had dinner across the way at Tony’s. All of this had been planned out beforehand, back when they thought they’d be spending the full day in Magic Kingdom, right into the evening with the party.

“I’ll tell you what I’m doing,” I told Cruella, who was obviously curious as to what I was furiously typing away, “I’m setting you up for Halloween tickets right now.”

“How much will they cost?” She reached into her purse for her wallet.

“FREE!” I yelled back. I wish I had pre-made small confetti cannons that I could set off whenever I did something magical for a guest, like give them free tickets, just to drive the point home a little bit more.

“Wha-what?” Cruella stammered.

“I understand you’ve had a pretty crappy week so far, and I don’t want it to get worse. You guys are all here, you’re dressed up, I want you to go to the party and get lots of candy, OK?”

The words were barely out of my mouth, and Cruella burst into tears. These were different tears from the ones earlier, because those were sad tears. These were happy tears, and Cruella leaned over the counter and threw her arms around my shoulders. It startled me.

“Thank you thank you thank you!” she whispered as she clutched me tight, like a mom does. “This is amazing.”

“It will take a second to print up. Do you want to wait, or do you have to get over to dinner?”

Cruella looked down at her watch. “We were supposed to check in ten minutes ago.”

“OK, how about you guys head over there, check in, and I’ll bring everything over to the restaurant in a bit. How does that sound? Don’t worry about anything else. I’ll take care of it.”

Cruella nodded and continued to cry. She thanked me again. She shook my hand. She told me I was an angel. I smiled as big as I could, but I was really just doing my job. I was here to make her vacation a little bit better.

Twenty minutes later, when I knew they were already into their dinner, I gathered up their tickets, grabbed some wristbands and a few treat bags (along with some Mickey stickers), and I walked over to Tony’s. No one questioned why I was heading over there with all the fixings for Not So Scary, but no one really cared, either.

At Tony’s, I walked up to the front desk. The woman standing behind the podium wasn’t sure what I was doing there, but she put on a smile to help me anyway.

I told her about the family dressed as 101 Dalmatians. She seemed to remember them checking in. I could see into the restaurant, and I pointed to their table. “Could you bring all of this to them for me? I don’t want to make a scene. Just bring it over and say that their friend just dropped it off, and hopes they have a wonderful time tonight.”

The cast member nodded and hurried off into the middle of Tony’s to drop off the goodies. I never saw that family again, but for some reason, I’ve always remembered the woman dressed as Cruella, crying hysterically in front of me. First sad tears, then happy.

What is this bus? What is this bus that takes cast members back and forth between the parking lot and Magic Kingdom? What is that
even
?

I can’t fault Magic Kingdom for this, because technically it’s not the park’s fault. No one back in 1971 could have ever anticipated that one day, there would be over 65,000 cast members — and counting — at the Walt Disney World Resort. So no one stopped to think, “Where are they all going to park?”

Back when the park opened, cast members parked right out front, where the general parking is located. But back then, everything was different, and attendance wasn’t nearly what it is now. It was okay for the regular parking lot to be some day guests, some cast members. And back then, it wasn’t so much of a “thing” to see cast members walking into work.

Some time after park opening, it was decided that cast member parking needed to be moved to a different location. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really a good location to choose from. There was no land around Magic Kingdom that was easily accessible for cast members to park, and then hoof it into the park, because of one thing: the train.

The train hinders so many things at Magic Kingdom. Who ever would have guessed that the train would be the big problem of the park? That train is also never going away, ever, if only because Walt Disney loved trains. Buying those trains was also one of the last things he did before he died in 1966, so they are most certainly never going to leave Magic Kingdom. The train, no matter how few people ride it, will always remain in the park.

Which is why the park either needs to build around the train, or somehow bypass it completely.

There was no way to build a cast parking lot near the train. Also, how magical would it be to see a bunch of cast members park their car and go to work every day? Not exactly the train ride Walt was thinking of. Because of this, the cast member parking lot had to be built a little ways offy. Except that Magic Kingdom had already built up a lot of area around the park as it is, so the cast member parking lot needed to go even farther away.

You can’t see cast parking from inside the park, because trust me, I’ve looked for it. It’s completely hidden behind everything. It even took me a little bit of time to find it on my first day driving into Magic Kingdom.

So you want to get to cast parking yourself? OK, it’s easy. There’s a road that loops all around the backside of Magic Kingdom, and that’s what you’re going to want to take. Drive to either the Contemporary Resort or Grand Floridian. Then, keep driving past that location. It’s easiest to get to from the Contemporary, so let’s pretend that we’re there. Drive past it. Space Mountain will be on your left.

A little ways down, there’ll be a four-way stop. If you go straight, it takes you to the Grand Floridian. If you take a left, you turn into the backstage entrance to Fantasyland. If you go to the right, you hit Central Shops and Textile Services and Disney University. Those buildings are huddled together, close enough to the park but still distant enough that they’re out of the way. Once you’ve passed them, and then driven just a little farther, you’ll hit West Clock parking.

I have no idea why this parking lot is called West Clock. It might be one of those things that
you
know and
I
don’t. Most things at Disney do have intricate back stories for names, but I could never get a clear answer about West Clock. There’s not even a clock there. I’m serious. I hear the name “West Clock” and I imagine a giant, freestanding clock that sort of looks like Big Ben in Peter Pan, but scaled down. West Clock didn’t have that.

The parking lot was maybe half the size of Studios’ regular parking lot (some of it even spilled over to the other side, in front of Disney University). It was just rows and rows of parking, up and down every which way. When I arrived in the morning for work, anytime between 6:30am and 8am, it was no problem finding parking. If I arrived at 8:05am, it was impossible to find parking. You could easily spend a half hour driving up and down the rows trying to find a lone parking spot in the sea of cars. Sometimes you’d give up and park your car illegally on the end and hope that Disney security didn’t come around and give you a ticket.

Later on in the afternoon the parking lot would empty out, usually just after parade time. Anyone who’s working a full eight hours, and came to work in the morning, will leave between that 2pm and 4pm. It’d be hard to find parking again around 5pm, but then as it got later on in the evening, everyone went home.

Occasionally, I’d show up with barely enough time to find a spot and circle through a few rows with no luck. That’s when I’d awkwardly sit in my car and wait for a cast member to exit off the bus and begin the walk to their parked car. I’d casually follow behind them in my car, stalking them for their parking space.

The rows were also one-way. You could always tell a late cast member because they were driving the wrong way down a one-way lane. They might also cut through different lanes trying to snag a spot, and you’d hear tires screech and cars honk, and a few crashes from time to time. It was highly likely, probably at least once a week, to see someone towing a cark in the parking lot because of small accidents. Then, you’d be even
later
to work.

So okay, park the car. Now it’s time to trek from the car to the bus stop. It really was just a bus stop. It wasn’t even a glorified bus stop. Think of the bus stops you find at the hotels, with all the benches and monitors to watch as you wait for the next bus to arrive. Cast members got none of that. We barely got a working fan to keep us cool on hot days.

The bus stop was a small and crowded place. Every now and then Disney tried to make it better for us, but it never worked. Their improvements were really just bothersome, and usually incredibly inefficient. The lone vending machine there barely worked.