Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations (3 page)

Something strange happened during this meeting. I realized that the managers at DisneyQuest really cared. The three sitting with me were genuinely concerned for me, and were worried that I might leave the College Program because I was so unhappy at DisneyQuest. They didn’t want that to happen, and promised to work with me to make sure I had the best program
ever
. It’s not something they necessarily needed to do, but they wanted to do it.

Day #31 was the first best day at Disney World for me, because I no longer hated being stuck inside DisneyQuest. While I didn’t feel like part of the Magic Kingdom (yet), I felt like I was actually a part of something, even though a part of me was still a little bit sad that the
something
was DisneyQuest.

Guest used to walk into the first-floor lobby of DisneyQuest and go, “What is this place?” The answer is, “It’s an arcade,” and it’s an arcade no matter how you slice it and no matter how many times I was told to call it an “indoor-interactive theme park”. No one is buying that, DisneyQuest. Sometimes, if I was feeling very bold, I would tell the guests, “Oh, this is a hotel.”

I also told a few guests that it was an indoor ice skating rink, and I told a few that it was a giant IMAX theater.

So, if you’re one of those guests who stuck your head into DisneyQuest and asked, “What is this place?”, here are the DisneyQuest basics: think of it as Disney’s version of Dave & Busters. That’s DisneyQuest. It had two floors dedicated to old-school arcade games, and it also had these “virtual reality games”. Back in 1998 when it opened, DisneyQuest was pretty revolutionary. The idea behind DisneyQuest was to constantly send it through updates — just like the parks. So, as technology in gaming changed, DisneyQuest would change, too.

Except that it didn’t. DisneyQuest opened, and then no one thought about it again. After a few short years, the technology inside was mostly outdated, but there were never any concrete plans to do anything about it.

Inside you’d find a roller-coaster simulator where you could design your own roller coaster. That was sort of cool, I guess. Along with that, there was a giant bumper cars ride, where you could sling foam balls at other cars, and if it hit another car, it spun out of control. That was fun, but also a pain, and it constantly broke down.

There was not just one attraction that let you wore an early version of an Oculus helmet, but two. They were virtual-reality simulators where you wore one of the helmets on your head, and then pulled at a little trigger in front of you to control the motion. Guest either hated them or would leave the attraction horribly motion sick — there was no in-between.

There was also some sort of raft virtual Jungle Cruise ride, which is impossible to explain, so just Google that one, OK? And along with that, Mighty Ducks Pinball Slam. For that one, you were the pinball in a giant pinball game. It was based on the short-lived and quickly forgotten animated
Mighty Ducks
cartoon series that ran for 26 episodes in 1996 (and featured walking, talking, hockey playing ducks). Someone at Disney thought it would be a good idea to base an entire ride off of this short-lived TV show, so in 2010 small children were like, “What the hell is this?”

Then, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. When DisneyQuest opened, it was a Hercules ride, but
Hercules
didn’t do as well as
Pirates
at the box office, so things changed. For this attraction, you boarded a “ship” and wore 3D glasses on your head and fired a cannon at ships in front of you on three giant monitors. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same technology used at Toy Story Midway Mania. The Pirates game (and the Hercules one before it) was the “test” to see if something like Midway Mania could actually work. At DisneyQuest, the Imagineers learned that it
could
work, and the same technology was implemented at both Midways in California and at Hollywood Studios.

If all this sounds cool, for about two hours it might be. However, after two hours, and after you’ve played all the games, there’s nothing left to do at DisneyQuest. With outdated technology, it began to bore guests. A decade later, DisneyQuest was in dire need of an overhaul. It was a joke. Guests would walk into the building and leave upset that they had wasted $50 to go to an arcade that didn’t even give out tickets for prizes (in Disney’s defense, when it first opened there were tickets and prizes, but those quickly went away. The left-over prizes were hidden on the fourth floor in the corner, in the tall rocket ship for the bumper cars game.) When DisneyQuest opened, there also used to be a slide from the third floor down to the first floor — no joke. But after one kid went down it and broke his wrist, the slide was covered up. It’s still hidden in the walls.

I once asked a manager why DisneyQuest was continuously passed over for a refurbishment. Had it kept up with current gaming technology, DisneyQuest might have been great. But, I was told that since DisneyQuest was a part of Downtown Disney, it needed to get its money from there. Every Disney-owned establishment at Downtown Disney splits its gross evenly, and clearly DisneyQuest needed more money than others for any sort of refurbishment. It never got the money. So, while other places at Downtown could be re-done every few years, DisneyQuest needed to save up its money. They saved for years and years, but then things inside kept breaking down. Walls needed to be repainted. They needed to get a few new arcade games, just to have a little bit of a draw. DisneyQuest could barely afford to keep itself in business, and the dismal ticket sales weren’t helping. Even on a day when it was closed to capacity (and this only ever happened when it was raining), there were less than 4,000 people inside. Those ticket sales aren’t enough to do anything — especially if half of the guests inside didn’t even buy tickets, because they came as part of a Fun and More option on their park tickets.

Essentially, DisneyQuest was doomed.

By the second month of my college program, DisneyQuest and I had a much better relationship. However, I still had qualms about it.

For one, I worked horrible hours. As a CP, we were given the worst hours to work, since we were the lowest on all Disney totem poles. While it might have been fine working at a park with awful hours (even if that did mean I’d have to work from 8pm to 2am sometimes), it would have at least given me a half a day to lead a life down in Florida. At DisneyQuest, I worked from 4pm to 10:30pm. On Fridays and Saturdays, it was 5pm to 11:30pm. I would have to leave for work right around 3pm to make it there on time, and I’d come back around midnight most days. So the next morning, I’d sleep in. By the time I was up and ready to do something, it was already time to head into work.

The constant schedule also meant that my paycheck was always the same. At the time, I was being paid $8.25 an hour. Then, Disney took out the housing costs. The first paycheck I got from Disney was a dismal $45 and I cried on the phone to my mom.

The hours and pay never got better. Week after week, it was the same schedule. Sometimes I’d pick up an extra shift and work on one of my days off, but even then I was barely making any money. In college, I never struggled financially because I worked a side job, in addition to my course load. I always had spending money, and I had a meal plan that would feed me every single day. Disney was the first time I was actually buying food for myself, and gas, and necessities, and all those things quickly added up. I saved no money during my college program, and had to tap into my savings to get by toward the end. It was rough.

One of the managers at DisneyQuest promised that my hours would increase come the holiday season, but that wasn’t necessarily true. Sure, the hours across every other area of the property were increasing, but for DisneyQuest everything stayed the same. It still opened and closed at the same time, every single day of the week (whereas, Magic Kingdom was suddenly open for an additional four hours every night).

Sometimes, a manager would call me into work early, so I’d get a few extra hours a week. Sometimes, they’d ask me if I wanted to work a double, or open to close. I said yes at the time, because I desperately needed the money. However, if someone ever asks you, “Hey, do you want to work 12 hours inside at DisneyQuest?” politely decline. Think of it as like being stuck inside a casino all day: there are no windows, no doors, and no way out. OK, it’s kind of like working in the Haunted Mansion’s Stretching Room, I guess.

On any given day at DisneyQuest, there were about a thousand people in the building at once. By contrast, “it’s a small world” can cycle through around 600 guests an hour. DisneyQuest was not popular. Sometimes I would go hours without any guest interaction.

There was an attraction on the fifth floor that was completely hidden away from everything: Invasion. It was just a fancy computer game that you could play with four of your friends. It had a joystick for each player, and you watched four monitors in front of you. You sat in these tiny little “pods” that didn’t have air circulation and always smelled horribly. The only time guests ever happened upon it is if they got lost looking for the bathroom. And if no one was wandering around the fifth floor looking for the bathroom, no one came over to play Invasion.

It’s one thing if you’re standing outside, say, Tower of Terror waiting for guests to walk by. Lots of guest will walk by, so time passes quickly. If there are no guests walking by, and you’ve been staring at the same spot of wall for an hour, time passes in reverse. The only thing nice about Invasion is that DisneyQuest actually piped in a radio station on the fifth floor, so at least I wasn’t listening to the same background music on loop for hours on end. There was some variety.

But that’s how slow it was at DisneyQuest. There was never a long wait for any of the attractions inside. Sometimes Pirates had like a twenty-minute wait, but even that is nothing compared to the waits in the parks. Guest could easily breeze in and out of the building. They did. Sometimes guests would come in for an hour or two, leave to go have some dinner, and return later for a few more hours. It was simply the flow of DisneyQuest. There were never crowds.

For this reason, DisneyQuest was a popular place for more “seasoned” cast members — in other words, the older crop of cast members in their 60s and 70s. One woman there had started working at the Grand Floridian in 1971. She had earned her right to take it easy and do next to nothing at DisneyQuest.

My college program ended in January. I had survived six months at DisneyQuest and I felt like a champ. I was scheduled to move out during the second week of January, but I didn’t want to move out. I wasn’t ready to leave Disney World just yet. Heck, I had even started to
like
working at DisneyQuest, and wondered if I finally could fulfill my dream of working in a park.

DisneyQuest gave me the option to go seasonal, which is not the College Program, but it’s not part-time, either. Seasonal cast are given all the random shifts that no one else wanted, like 2pm to 8pm and 11am to 9pm. Fun shifts, of course. I accepted the position. I moved out of College Program housing and in with a girl I knew from college. We set up our little Florida apartment on the outskirts of Orlando, and I kept working at Disney.

Here’s where things get interesting. First, though, some background about the four different statuses you can hold at Walt Disney World:

College Program.
The lowest of the low at Disney. College Program participants are considered “interns” so they can put that on their resume instead of having to write, “I loaded guests onto Space Mountain.” CPs are treated like seasonal cast members, in the sense that they get none of the perks that otherwise come with being employed by Disney World. Sure, CPs get free admission to the parks, and back in my day we also got six family passes to the parks, but aside from that, nothing. We didn’t get holiday pay. We didn’t get overtime practically
ever
. Disney uses CPs like disposable cast members that come and go every six months. CPs aren’t allowed to advance higher in their roles, either. Since they’re temporary, Disney sees no point in promoting them (and providing the additional training that comes with a promotion).

Seasonal Cast Member.
Kind of like CPs, in the sense that there are no perks (aside from those six family passes). Seasonal cast members need to submit their availability to work a few months in advance, and are required to work a certain amount of hours to keep their status with Disney World. So, a seasonal cast member could technically work once every four months, and still enjoy admission to the parks every single day of the week. (The rules for being seasonal have changed drastically since I left, as there was a lot of seasonal abuse, such as a cast member who really would work only once every four months, and still go to the parks every single day, which Disney isn’t cool with.)

Seasonal cast members — like me, for a while — can also work all the time, as if they were part time or full time. But, there’s a catch. If a seasonal cast members works more than 28 weeks of “full-time work” (40 hours a week or more), they are “capped.”

That means, the seasonal cast members cannot be scheduled more than 23 hours. CANNOT. Like, no if, ands, or buts about it. There’s actually a button in Disney’s computer system that says “deny this cast member hours”. This is all because Disney doesn’t want to have to deal with seasonal cast members saying, “Well, I’ve been working 40-plus hours for this many weeks, so technically I’m already full time, so technically you need to give me health benefits.”

Disney watches seasonal cast members very closely for this reason. I learned that the hard way a few times when I got dangerously close to being capped. I started getting warnings about it around week #20. If I hit 28 weeks, there was no going back, and I would for sure go broke. There’s no way I could survive on less than 20 hours a week for the rest of the year.

Part-time Cast Member.
You guessed it, a cast member that is only considered part time. This means that a cast member cannot, and usually will not, be scheduled more than roughly 23 hours a week. During busy times, that number might increase, but part time cast members only need to give four days of availability. Being part time, of course, you aren’t given health insurance.