Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations (23 page)

Chrissy was my shift buddy. She clocked in shortly after me, and then we set out to walk to the window together.

“Have fun!” coordinator Sarah called after us. “The TTC had some issues this morning, so it might be a little bit busier for you today!”

Neither Chrissy nor I thought anything about this. This early in the morning it was always busy at the window. Chrissy was telling me about her after-work plans with her boyfriend, and I nodded along politely. “Oh, that should be fun!” I said, pretending to sound interested in the bar they were going to that night.

“You’re more than welcome to come!” Chrissy said, full on knowing that I would never in a million years go with her.

“I’ve got plans tonight, actually. But thanks!” Lie, I didn’t have any plans, and Chrissy probably knew that, too.

We walked across Main Street, making our way toward the other side, walking behind the train station. The park wasn’t open yet, so everything was relatively quiet. We then cut underneath the train station, and that’s when I noticed that there were a lot of people standing outside of the park. An abnormal number of people. It was March, so these weren’t big summer crowds. This was just a lot of people.

“Does that look odd to you?” I asked Chrissy, as we cut through the crowd of people already in the park. Usually there are lines to get through the turnstile in the morning, but this was different. These weren’t lines, these were crowds of people huddled together like they were waiting for something.

“Maybe they’re a tour group?” Chrissy replied. The door to the window was located in the middle of the locker area. Yeah, so we had to weave through the park’s locker location and find the secret, hidden window door. It wasn’t really secret, and it wasn’t really hidden, but to any unsuspecting guest they would never guess the door led anywhere important. It was a plain, white door.

Chrissy punched in the code to the door and pushed it open.

Have you ever walked into the middle of unfolding chaos? It was like something out of a movie. People yelling at one another, while someone else was screaming into a phone, another into a radio. The cast members already at the window were running — literally, running — back and forth between computer stations. One cast member had a whole roll of ticket stock in her hand, which was slowly falling apart as she moved between everyone. She hit her foot on something, lost her balance, and fell down, the pile of tickets falling around her like confetti. “Somebody pick that up!” a manager I didn’t recognized yelled.

“What is happening?” Chrissy eyes went wide.

“I have no idea,” I whispered back. Even though I wasn’t good friends with Chrissy, I knew at that moment we were having a shared, telepathic thought which was,
We should get out of here. Now.”

“Oh, sweet heavens, you’re here,” coordinator Monica said as she grabbed Chrissy by the arm, and Chrissy grabbed me by the arm. Monica led us to one side of the room. “We’re still not exactly sure what’s happening here, so it’s all hands on deck.”

“But what
is
happening?”

“The TTC lost power this morning, and it still hasn’t come back up. They can’t sell tickets over there right now, and they can’t activate tickets, either. Oh, and the monorail’s down, so everyone has to take the ferry. Epcot partially lost power as well, so they sent everyone at their front gates over to the TTC, and the TTC sent all of them over here.” Monica didn’t have time to explain anything else to us. The cast member at window 6 started waving her hands frantically in the air, begging for help. Monica went off running.

“Do you want to go home?” I asked Chrissy.

“They’ll probably never notice if we just leave.”

“OK, so on the count of three, we go home. One, two—” I actually started making my way toward the back door to disappear. But then the other coordinator of the morning, Steve, saw us trying to dart away and snapped his fingers three times.

“Just drop your money in whatever drawer is open. Don’t even count it. I need you girls to go outside and start pulling people out of line who don’t have a ticket question. We’re not doing anything about dining reservations, GACs (Guest Assistance Cards, for guests with disabilities), or hotels. Tickets only. They can deal with all the other shit inside the park.”

Outside was even worse. Think of a crowded Disney World area, maybe that area in Frontierland right between Splash and Thunder, or over by the Safari in Animal Kingdom. Multiply that by fifteen, and then still add a hundred, because that’s what it was like outside. Everyone trying to get tickets had crammed into the tiny area in front of the window, and there wasn’t space for everyone. Guests spilled over into the line for the turnstiles, and security was backed up all the way to the boat docks.

There was also no rhyme or reason to anything. The window actually has a queue, but on even a busy day it’s maybe only three rows deep. Sometimes during the summer it got longer, and an extended queue continued on a few more turns.

But the line was still longer than that, as it snaked around every spare inch of space outside the Magic Kingdom, and guests were just everywhere. It wasn’t even a line. It was a glob of people. It was an actual mass of people, like someone had organized a flash mob for the area, but no one had choreographed anything, and instead everyone just showed up at MK, cranky, looking for one-day admission tickets.

It was bad.

Chrissy and I headed out to this mess and tried to fight our way through the crowd to find the beginning of the line, which was already three rows back. A Guest Relations cast member had been sent out there to guard it. We started there. And then the two of us went one by one for about a hundred people, asking each and every one of them what they were waiting for in line. If it was a ticket issue, they got to stay. If it was for anything else, we politely told them to leave the line, because they were wasting their time. Lots of guests were trying to get GACs and dining reservations for some strange reason. Chrissy and I sent them into the park, and told them to get help in City Hall. There was no way the window could deal with anything other than tickets this morning.

Because, it was still only 9am.

As Chrissy and I worked our way through the line (“Hi! How can we help you? No, we’re unfortunately not handling the ticket issues ourselves, we’re just wondering what you’re doing in line! Yes, you still have to wait in this line, I can’t get you your tickets and bring them out here for you. So sorry about that! Thanks for being patient!”), another cast member, Terry, had come outside to try and make sense of the line. The queue was completely full, and past the queue, people were lining up everywhere. No one could figure out where the line began, so everyone was starting to get a little bit testy with one another. And this was at 9:15am.

Terry was given a roll of duct tape and told to make an extended-extended queue for the guests, which quickly proved to be impossible. He tried making hop-scotch lines on the ground, with arrows showing guests where they needed to get in line for tickets, but it failed miserably. Guests ignored him or stepped right over his lines. One guest started screaming at Terry for some unknown reason, and his screams were so loud security had to come over and deal with the situation. Terry hurried back inside, and refused to go outside again.

Moments later, Chrissy and I were pulled back inside, too, because our manager was worried about our safety. He didn’t want two little female cast members out there in a mad herd of guests, all desperate to get tickets and get into the park. Chrissy and I both felt comfortable being outside, but manager David said no. “Help out inside instead. If things quiet down, you can go back out there.”

Things didn’t quiet down.

From 9am–1pm, there’s usually a steady line at the window. When guests arrive at Disney, usually their first stop is Magic Kingdom. Naturally, it’s the busiest park, so that means the ticket window is the busiest, since guests need to pick up their tickets. That’s why Magic Kingdom has a ticket booth with eight separate windows, while Hollywood Studios has three. Animal Kingdom has two. We know how to deal with our lines, and usually waiting in the queue will take no more than 20 minutes, tops.

However, take that already crowded MK line, and add in everyone who can’t buy tickets at the TTC that morning. That’s every single guest coming in for just the day at Magic Kingdom. Also, all group sales. They were standing in front of the window. Plus, a good chunk of people from Epcot, too, since their computer system wasn’t up and running yet, and they had been sent over to MK for tickets.

It was the perfect storm of everything that could go wrong. And since the monorail wasn’t working, guests came in HUGE crowds off the ferryboat, and every single one of them seemed to gravitate toward the window. You can’t go into Magic Kingdom without a ticket.

Manager David made the decision that if a ticket situation took longer than 5 minutes, we were just going to print out comp tickets for the guests. Punch the information into the computer as quickly as possible, file it away, and then make it rain comp tickets for all these guests. He started off saying that we should only do it for situations that looked like they might take awhile. And then David said, “Screw it, give everyone a comp to get them out of here.” He started printing up huge batches of comp tickets, and everyone who approached the window got one.

Even then, the line didn’t die down.

One guest told me he waited over two hours. That’s two hours in the direct sun, that’s not two hours waiting in the air-conditioned Space Mountain line. The Magic Kingdom window isn’t shaded in the least bit. No matter what time of day it is, morning, noon, or night, there is no shade. So these guests were standing in the direct sun for a prolonged period of time. I saw at least two people pass out. So take this giant, humongous crowd, and now add in a medical unit that is trying to get to the unconscious guests in the middle of the queue.

David decided to go get as many cases of water as possible so we could hand them out to the guests. It was a nice gesture, but the guests were still furious.

There was a pregnant woman in line, who had been standing in the direct sun, and after about a half hour she began bawling hysterically. She couldn’t wait any longer, and she had a group of kids with her. One cast member went rushing out with comp tickets for her so she could get into the park ASAP.

Well, that made all the other guests furious. Who was this pregnant woman to get special treatment? The cast member who went out there, Brett, tried his best to explain that this was a severe situation, and things like this don’t normally happen, and the guest was pregnant. But if you give special treatment to one guest, you have to give special treatment to all of them.

At one point, Terry made the mistake of suggesting Entertainment come down with characters, to entertain the guests waiting in line. David popped a vein in his forehead; he yelled so much at poor Terry.

“HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST SOMETHING AS INNANE AS THAT? WHO ARE YOU? GO TAKE A WALK.” David pointed to the door and banished Terry from the window for a good half hour. We were all secretly jealous of him, because he got to escape for a little bit.

No one got a break until noon. Not even the cast members who had come in at 7am. We were barely rationed bathroom breaks, and that was a struggle, too, since the queue had by now wrapped around to the bathrooms.

Our drawers ran out of money — something that never,
ever
happened — and we ran out of ticket stock at least once an hour. We were trying to solve all ticket issues as quickly as possible, but I think it’s safe to say that a good 80% of guests that day got free comp tickets into the park.

When the line still hadn’t died down after lunch, we started pulling cast members from City Hall to be runners for us. They would just run back and forth between the window and City Hall, printing out tickets and trying to fix issues. They started printing out comp tickets, too, which more than likely meant that a solid 90% of all guests got in for free that day.

Someone threw away my Starbucks coffee.

Around 4pm, the line started to disappear. By that point, either the guest had made it into the park, or had grown tired of waiting and gave up. When I left the window to walk to RCC shortly before the end of my 5pm shift, there was still a line. It still wrapped around a little bit, and I prayed for the cast members who were scheduled to head in that night and would walk into a war zone.

It was, by far, the most stressful day I ever encountered at the Magic Kingdom.

The Castle was always a hot topic in the park. Guests wanted to get inside of it, and so did cast members.

The Castle is really nothing but a giant, hollow shell of fiberglass. It has a second floor, and that’s where you’ll find Cinderella’s Royal Table, the most popular and overrated dining in all of Disney World (it’s popular because you get to dine with
all
of the princesses, and that opportunity is priceless). There’s nothing else inside the Castle.

Well… that’s not entirely true. There’s something else inside of there, as you are probably well aware.

Walt had his apartment above the Fire Station in Disneyland, and there were plans for him to have an apartment in Disney World as well. It was going to be inside of the Castle. But, Walt died before the park was ever built. The apartment inside the Castle was offered to Walt’s brother Roy, but he didn’t think it was appropriate for him to stay in the Castle, so he passed on the apartment.

The space meant for the apartment was left vacant. It was used as storage for a while. It was used as a green room for the dancers during the Castle stage show. And for a while, the Disney Reservation Center sat up there, so when you used to call the 407-WDW number, you were actually talking to someone sitting inside Cinderella Castle.

Then, during the Year of a Million Dreams, that space inside the Castle was made into the Dream Suite, or more commonly called the Cinderella Suite.

Everyone knows there’s a room up there, and everyone wants to stay in that room. Oddly enough, Guest Relations “owns” that room. They’re the ones who are in charge of it. They’re not the ones booking the stays up there (since that is strictly done through the Marketing Department), but when the suite is occupied, it’s a few GR cast members who take care of the guests inside.