Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations (20 page)

It’s the window’s break room, but it is the size of a closet. That’s not an exaggeration whatsoever.

I don’t know how the break closet came to be. It was just there. The Guest Relations window opened with the park, so that’s 1971. That means the break close has probably been around this whole time.

More than likely, what happened was someone was using this random closet in the GR window, and realized that the space extended farther back than they originally thought. When you first opened the break closet door, you entered into a small 4x4 space. There were lockers on the right side, to hold our things. Then to the left, at one point there was probably a wall. Maybe a dry wall that got knocked down for some reason or another, and that’s when the break closet was truly discovered.

Venturing farther to the left, the space opened up a bit, though not into a space where lots of people could sit. Instead, it opened into a sort of hexagon-shaped area that had lots of exposed wires and insulation. And whoever first found this space probably thought to themselves,
Oh my gosh, what a perfect area to sit and eat my lunch!

Over time, this space evolved into a real, working break space. Or, at least that’s what Guest Relations wanted us to believe. They bought us a fridge to put back there, and hung some lights, and added a few more folding chairs. It really only made the space more miserable. There were no windows, obviously, and no air circulation. So imagine sitting in an actual closet, trying to eat a sandwich, with stale air and fifteen other cast members all crammed into the space, too.

It was also the only space in the window not “on stage”. So if you needed to make a phone call, you had to go into the closet. But if there were three people who all needed to make a phone call, you’d find yourself inside the tiny space with three other people, all yelling on the phone about something or other. And then two other people in the corner, quietly trying to eat their lunch.

Sure, we could hoof it over to the Mouse and sit there, but our break time was important. Every second counts, and there was no such thing as a quick walk in a Guest Relations costume. Someone would stop us and ask us a question, and those are valuable seconds of sitting and eating time. Even though we hated it, most of the time we stayed in the closet for sheer convenience.

If there was no manager in the window, I’d sit on the floor behind Window 1. That window, for some reason, was higher than the others and had a lot of space in it. I could sit on the floor, still out of guests’ view, and eat my lunch in peace. It wasn’t ideal, no, because I was sitting on the floor, after all. But it got me out of the tiny, stuffy closet, if only for a little while.

There’s college program status, and then seasonal status, part-time status, and full-time status. But, there’s actually one other status that’s very important: temporary assignment.

What I said about Disney not creating jobs out of thin air is true. Disney can’t just create a bunch of jobs to give to eager applications, because Disney is a business. But, they can go ahead and create a hundred temporary assignments for cast members, so technically speaking they have a job, but they won’t have that job forever.

Temporary assignments, or TAs, at Disney are on one hand great, and on the other hand, awful.

Most TAs happen during the busier summer and holiday seasons. Disney realizes that there are going to be more guests in the parks, so they need more cast members to deal with that. Instead of going out and hiring a bunch of new cast members, they instead enlist these TAs to work as supplemental labor. Disney pays them, they train in the jobs, they work the jobs, but when they’re no longer needed, Disney just sends them back to their original work location, wherever it may be.

When you apply to work Guest Relations, you’re technically applying to work one of these TAs. No one is just hired into Guest Relations. So you instead are pulled to a GR TA at some point, and it’s then that you have to prove your work to the area, so they will one day hire you to be a real GR cast member (it’s sort of like how Pinocchio one day hopes he can grow up and become a real boy. He’s still a walking and talking puppet, but he’s made of wood. In this analogy, the TAs are the wood puppets, hoping to one day become human.)

Out of the 100 cast members who work GR, only about 30 of them are actually statused to the area — meaning that GR is their home, it’s their work location forever and ever, and there’s no chance that they’re going to wake up one day and be sent away. They can’t. They’ve been statused to GR.

Then there are maybe 20 or so professional interns (a step above the college program) who work in GR. That leaves roughly 50 cast members who are all on TAs. They’ve been bought into the area to work GR, and they wear the red plaid and get a big, shiny D pin, but at any give time a manager can say, “Thanks for all your hard work! But we’re sending you back to where you came from.”

This made things very,
very
stressful in GR every single day.

Everyone wants to stay in Guest Relations. No one wants to return back to his or her former role. So every TA is vying for maybe one spot that opens up every other month. When a full-time statused cast member would leave the area, one spot would open up. Everyone would know that spot opened up, and suddenly everyone started working a lot harder, and would compliment the managers as much as possible, and seemingly go out of their way to bend over backwards for the department in whatever way they could. The department would say, “JUMP!” and the TAs would be like “WHAT DO YOU WANT US TO DO WHILE WE’RE UP HERE JUMPING?”

When I started in Guest Relations, I was under the assumption that I was on a part-time TA. So when the Celebrate Greeter position went away, I was convinced that meant I was being sent back to Great Movie Ride. I think that’s what the area actually wanted to do with me; they had brought me on to be a Celebrate Greeter, and now that it was gone, they had no more use for me. Bye!

However, maybe intentional or maybe by accident, I was statused part-time to Guest Relations. No one realized this for a few months, which is why I think it was an accident. I was accidentally statused to Guest Relations. The last thing anyone wanted to do was tell me there had been a mistake, and un-status me and send me back, because that raises all sorts of questions. I probably would have thrown a hissy fit, and maybe taken a complaint to Casting or some higher-ups over it.

I was under the assumption from March until October that I was a TA. I was working my tushy off to prove my worth so I could stay in the area. Then one day, middle of the week, the manager in charge of the headcount (what Disney called keeping track of all the cast members) told me that I was statused. I thought it was a new thing, and I immediately burst into tears, so thankful to finally call GR my home.

“No, no, this isn’t a new thing. You’ve been statused all along,” he said, trying to get me to stop crying out on the counter. “You came in statused to the area.”

“Am I still part time?” I asked, wiping back tears with the sleeve of my shirt.

“Yeah, still part time. Part-time statused to Magic Kingdom.”

“Oh.” Literally nothing changed upon hearing this. I continued to work barely any hours. There was now just no way Magic Kingdom could send me back to GMR, no matter how hard they tried. I was theirs.

Not soon after this, I was put on a full-time GR TA. So I was statused as a part-time GR cast member, but then they put me on one of their own TAs. I, once again, think this was an accident. The manager who had been in charge of headcount left, and it was handed over to the ditzier, most confused manager of the area. I think she thought I was on a part-time TA, and decided to throw me a bone by instead putting me on a full-time TA.

When she came over to tell me this, I was sitting in the window and she tapped me on the shoulder. “Annie, I’ve got good news!”

“What?” I asked, spinning around in my chair.

“We’re going to keep you on a full-time TA! How does that sound?”

And I went, “YAAAAAAY!” Because that meant more hours.

“I forget, though, what’s your old area? I want to contact them and explain that we’re going to keep you here a little bit longer.”

Long, awkward pause of silence. “Um, my old area is MKGR. I’ve been statused part time here for almost nine months.”

“Oh.” That’s all the manager said, and then she walked away.

The average length of time anyone spent on a TA at MK was about a year. They’d come to the area, whether during the summer or holiday season, and then just stay. And keep staying. The managers would decide on an end date, but when that time rolled around, you’d still keep getting scheduled at MK, so that meant you were still a TA.

There were a few unlucky souls who found themselves on a TA, and then three months later were sent back to their old areas. We always felt bad for them, because they had come so close, only to have it ripped away. If you were sent away from a TA, you were more than likely never going to come back to Guest Relations, ever. So kiss that lofty career in GR goodbye.

On one of these long, extended temporary assignments, the TAs would literally do anything in their power to stay longer, if not forever. Some days we’d walk into City Hall and find that the entire counter had been rearranged and organized, a lame attempt by a TA to get statused. Other times, TAs would go through and make master lists of all the phone numbers for the park and the property. Once, a girl made the “Giant Book of Menus” which was literally just a giant book of every single menu that you could get on property. She went through and printed off every. single. menu. from. every. single. restaurant.

The managers hated it, and the poor TA was scolded for wasting upwards of 500 pages of perfectly good computer paper to make her 500+ page Book of Menus. She was dismissed from her TA shortly thereafter, and we never saw her back in Magic Kingdom again.

I was never one to suck up, so I had a hard time trying to figure out how to be statused for a real full-time position. I kept on doing my best, honestly. That’s why I had learned all of the tours, because I felt that made me more valuable to the area.

Magic Kingdom didn’t see it that way, though. At one point I was told I was “spreading myself too thin” by working all the different guided tours, and a manager told me I needed to spend more time working window shifts. Their reasoning never made sense.

I watched as cast members who had come in after me got statused before me, and that stung. I remember there was one time where five full-time cast members left at once, which meant that there were five open full-time spots. I felt like I was most certainly going to get one. For me, it was pushing a year and a half in the area, and I thought I
deserved
one of those spots.

Instead, the spots went to two brand-new TAs, and three others who I had initially trained with way back when I first started. One of them was Chrissy, who had done enough sucking up to last her a lifetime. When I learned the news, I cried alone in my empty apartment and I thought about calling into work sick the next day because I was so upset.

Eventually I was statused full-time, but it still took awhile. I remember I was sitting at one of the computers in the back room of Guest Relations, doing absolutely nothing besides killing time. The same ditzy manager who put me on the full-time TA initially came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Annie, can we talk for a second?”

I spun around in my chair. “What’s up?” I asked, thinking nothing of the question.

“I’ve got some bad news,” she said, “We’ve decided to end your full-time TA—”

That’s all I needed to hear. I burst out crying in front of the four other cast members standing in the Bank Out Room. I tried to form words, but it just came out as more sobbing tears.

“No, no, don’t cry!” the manager yelled, bending down to my level. “We’re ending your TA because we’ve statused you full time! There’s nothing to cry about here!”

I stopped crying. “That was mean,” I told the manager.

“We took bets on whether you were going to cry or not.”

I wanted to do more in Guest Relations. After a year, I felt comfortable enough to audition for Keys to the Kingdom. I got it; I was trained as a new Keys guide

With Family Magic, we spent a week learning a tour that was 99% improvised. With Keys, we spent two weeks learning a tour that we needed to know backwards and forwards without missing a beat. The training script for Keys is roughly 90 pages, front and back. It covers everything we could possibly talk about over the course of the five-hour tour, and then some. It was full of other supplementary information like, How do the fireworks work? How is everything recycled at the park? Do you want to know more information about Liberty Square?

It was enough reading material to put anyone to sleep, and I needed to memorize most of it. While we were given things we needed to talk about on Keys, there was also a lot of room for other things, too. So, while I needed to talk about the windows on Main Street, I could also talk about other things on Main Street as well.

That’s why I literally needed to know everything, and I mean
everything
, about the Magic Kingdom.

Training was a lot about learning the layout of the park, and how everything flowed. I’d be walking it with twenty guests on a daily basis, so I needed to know the timing of parades, and also crowd flow, to easily navigate. I also needed to be able to anticipate things, like weather. What happens if it starts raining, and I’m standing in the middle of Frontierland? What do I do, and what do I do with my guests?

Every morning, training would start off in the conference room above City Hall. We’d spend a little bit of time talking about the Magic Kingdom and the tour, and then we’d actually go out and do the tour. Every single day, we walked around the park at least three times. We ran the tour route backwards and forwards, and then again three more times.

The trainers, two guys named Christopher and Brett, kept us on our toes the entire time. We’d be walking, and suddenly Christopher would point at a random building and go, “So what’s inside there?” and I needed to be able to answer.