Amber Earns Her Ears: My Secret Walt Disney World Cast Member Diary (6 page)

I realized, waiting in line for some ride or another, that our group had really coalesced: we were our own little Fab Five. Jenni was Goofy; Leah, the princess, was Minnie; Paige, with her Disney knowledge, could be no one but the big mouse himself, Mickey; and Alex, with his quiet personality, was Pluto. Which left me, with a snarky little attitude and crabbiness in the mornings, as Donald.

It was perfect.

MY FIRST DAYS AT Walt Disney World were hectic and slightly overwhelming — it was all that I thought it would be, and more.

My free time, however, wasn’t exactly how I planned it. Your days are not filled with work (as much as I would eventually try to cram my schedule), and things that happen on your days off are just as entertaining as things that happen while on duty.

Take, for instance, a solo trip to the Orlando Target. Business casual attire was required for my first couple of days. I hadn’t brought enough. I was scheduled to tour EPCOT the next day, and I needed a shirt to wear. I had already taken one trip to Target with Leah, so I was sure I’d be able to find Target, buy my shirt, and get back home quickly.

I set out around five in the evening. My GPS (which my parents insisted on buying for me, because I have zero sense of direction) was turned on, even though I didn’t have the address of the Target store. I didn’t have any addresses in Florida plugged into my GPS. If you have a sense of direction as poor as mine, I recommend that you put your apartment address in your GPS as soon as you know it.

I found the Target store easily enough, and within a relatively short period of time, I had a shirt — plus some more things that had looked appealing as I strolled the aisles. I checked out and started back to the apartment.

After about ten minutes, I began to suspect that I had never before seen my present surroundings. It was taking much longer to get back; soon, I started to panic, as I realized that I was utterly lost. And I don’t handle being lost well; I tend to freak out a little when I don’t know where I am, or where I’m going.

So I was somewhere in Florida, driving in a random direction, and the sun was beginning to creep across the horizon, threatening to leave me lost and alone in the dark. Lovely.

I can’t remember how long I drove. I had somehow made my way onto a fairly deserted highway — not sure how that happened — and eventually pulled over at a gas station. My phone, of course, was dead, and my GPS was also on its way out. I had sent a slightly panicked call to my sister, Hayley, before my phone died, and though I didn’t know it, my parents were getting increasingly angry as time passed and I wasn’t answering my phone. My thinking was to let my phone charge, then call my roommates and get the apartment address, and then charge my GPS so I could finally find my way home.

Everything was taking longer to charge than I had thought, so I ventured into a gas station to ask for directions to Disney World. I figured if I could at least make it to Disney, I would be able to find the apartment complexes. The guy informed me that I had missed the exit; I needed to turn around and get off at the Arby’s sign.

I was now on an interstate, and I knew there was no way I would be able to find an Arby’s sign from there. But it was better than nothing; at least I knew to turn around instead of continuing to travel in the wrong direction. Who knows where I would have ended up. I drove a bit down the interstate, saw an exit for Orlando, and took it.

I spent what felt like the next hour following signs to Orlando, and then signs to Disney World. My tension, finally, began to ease when I passed through the Disney entrance gates. I was still lost, but at least I was lost on Disney property.

But now it was completely dark. Lovely. I pulled over at the Hess gas station across from Downtown Disney and asked the people working there for directions to the apartment complexes. Just to suit the tone of the night, they had no idea what I was talking about.

So I continued to drive around the property. Eventually, exhausted and just wanting to be home, I pulled into Saratoga Springs and begged the security guard for directions, praying that she knew where to find Chatham.

I have never been so thankful to a Cast Member as when she told me emphatically that she knew exactly where it was. She even went a step further and wrote down the directions for me; a good idea, as I was so frazzled from my adventures that I doubt I would have remembered.

A few minutes later, I pulled into my parking space at Chatham.

A roommate cheering-up party ensued — not so different from most nights in our apartment, but it was much needed. Leah, Paige, and Jenni listened sympathetically to my horror story, and then there were brownies, jokes, and board games that made me forget, mostly, how freaked out I had been about being lost somewhere in Florida.

Over time, the favor was returned. One of us would have an awful day, and immediately the apartment would kick into overdrive, doing whatever we could think of to cheer one another up. Sometimes it would be as simple as clearing off the living room table and coloring (there was a lot of coloring in our apartment), sometimes it would be sitting around on the couch munching on lemon bars and telling funny stories, and other times it would simply be offering a receptive ear.

EACH COLLEGE PROGRAM BUS has a letter to indicate where it goes: for example, the A bus goes to Magic Kingdom, the C bus to EPCOT, the J bus to Animal Kingdom, and so forth. In addition to a letter, each bus has a number (1-3) to denote its times of operation. Since these buses are available only for program participants, you need your housing ID to board. No exceptions. People often arrive late for work because they forgot their housing ID, and then had to fight with security to be let back into their apartment complex to get it.

The C (or EPCOT) bus is a cultural mish-mash. Chatty members of numerous cultures occupy groups of seats, leaning over the back or sitting in each other’s laps as they talk loudly to one another. More reserved individuals, such as myself, are often found with headphones shoved in their ears, or a book in their laps (I tend to do both). For me, the C bus is the most interesting of the buses, and sometimes I prefer to people-watch instead of read.

My first ride on the C bus came a few days after Traditions. I had had quite a break between the frenzy of arriving and the beginning of work, and I was eager to find out what it was I’d be doing. The first day was our tour of the park where we had been assigned; another helpful part of the program for those who have never actually been to Disney World, or maybe didn’t make it to all the parks. This is why we arrived at EPCOT early in the morning to meet in a random room tucked away in a random building. We were to be taught the specifics of our park, what it stood for, its history, the layout, and much, much more.

I imagine that for some people, this meeting is incredibly dull. I have to admit, there were times when I found my mind wandering to other things, especially since I come from a family that has a slight obsession with Disney, and so I knew a lot of the material we were going over. What kept our group from falling into a stupor was a group of French men, all of them tall, dark headed, and with a plethora of inside jokes (told mostly in French, of course). It seemed their mission was to see just how angry they could make our instructor. Whether it was comments muttered across the room in French or raucous laughter erupting from the back of the meeting room, not five minutes went by without someone receiving a glare from the poor woman trying to get through her spiel about EPCOT. Days like that, she must love her job.

After the seminar, we went on a tour of the park. Unfortunately, none of us had learned from previous experience, and weren’t quite prepared for the chilly wind blowing off the lagoon. In my skirt and cardigan, I was certainly less than thrilled about taking a walking tour around EPCOT. We were there before World Showcase opened, and as we watched, a Segway tour winded its way through the pavilions. Our tour guide, taking pity on us (and I’m sure there was personal motive, too), decided to spare us the mile-long trek around the World Showcase. Instead, we boarded a Friendship boat, and the tour — consisting of a brief history and a few fun facts — was conducted from the lagoon.

When we got off the boat, shivering in the wind, someone in our group lent me his coat — a welcome display of chivalry that was hugely appreciated. We headed toward first aid, the most important location on the tour. It was there that the group of French students, quiet for the majority of the tour in the park, began to act up again. Her temper made short by the continual interruptions and the cold, our instructor abandoned her glares and walked over to the group of misbehaving students. Their protestations of not understanding her English because she spoke too quickly, at first blurted out interspersed by chuckles, were quickly shot down as she threatened to have them sent back to their complexes to delay their training. All we heard from the French students for the rest of the day were markedly quieter chuckles.

The majority of training is a blur to me now, for good reason. A lot of hours were spent in cold rooms in front of a computer, watching monotonous, energy-draining videos about the proper way to serve alcohol and what to do if we observed someone shoplifting (basically nothing, just take a few notes on their appearance and call security). Some of the training videos were specific to Quick Service, my assigned role, and others we had to watch regardless of our roles. There were more classroom seminars teaching us how to properly lift boxes and other mundane tasks. It was all necessary, of course, but that in no way made it interesting.

Eventually, I got to meet with my training coordinator. There were four of us who were being trained at the Electric Umbrella. I arrived at the cast building early and took a seat in the break room, where I settled down to read until the others started to show up. We introduced ourselves, made sure the shoes we’d bought were okay for working in the kitchen, and headed to Costuming. There we tried on our wonderful two-toned red shirts, baseball caps, and black polyester pants.

Disney sizes really do not make any sense; I’m not even sure how they came up with a system for it. I wore so many different sizes. Even within one size — 4/27, for example — they ranged from the legs needing to be rolled up to me having to hold my breath to fasten the waist. You can check out three shirts, pants, and aprons at a time, plus your hat and belt. I would usually gather my three from Costuming and take them all home so I could change before work, though later I just started keeping them in my locker at Casting and changed there. Once, though, I was down to my last pair of pants, and was running a little late for work. I showed up with my pants a good three inches above my ankles. After some mocking on the part of my manager, he sent me back to Costuming to grab a new pair — which had the same numbers on them, of course, but which actually fit.

After we had stored our costumes in our lockers, we headed to the Electric Umbrella (fondly known as EU to those who work there) for the first time. We were given little slips of paper letting the cashier know that we were trainees, then gave our order and met our coordinator upstairs with our food. There we sat, ate our meal, and filled out forms on the service: Were the cashiers friendly? Did the fillers have a good attitude as they passed us our trays? Were the people in charge of cleaning up Beverage Island — the drink station — scowling as they mopped up another mess?

We were not wearing our name tags, but the guy bussing upstairs recognized us as trainees. When he saw that our training coordinator wasn’t there, he ambled over to our table.

“You guys about to start training here?”

We all looked up at him. I, for one, was a little put off by the attitude of “Knowledgeable Cast Member” that this guy, Brian, was trying to give off.

“Yes.”

“Do you wanna know how it really is?”

Now, let me just say, not all Cast Members are ideal. Not all of them fit the happy, upbeat, friendly mold that Disney requires. A major problem that I encountered was that a lot of people were here simply to get a semester off school to go party and score a nice boost to their résumé. After all, how hard could it be working at Disney World? Brian fit into this category of less-than-impressive Cast Members.

Of course, the other girls wanted to hear his insight into the workings of the company. As he rambled on about the inconveniences and ridiculous hours, I ate my burger and fries. When our coordinator rejoined us, the captivating busboy left to sullenly wipe down a table or two. Needless to say, he didn’t rate very high on my evaluation sheet. Nor did he make it very far into his program, either.

The next day it was time to put on my costume and board the C bus, embarking on my first day of real work. Our training schedule had us arriving at noon and staying until after closing. We were assigned a trainer who taught us several new positions throughout the day and then showed us how to close an area.

Training is a tricky thing. I learn quickly and independently; I’m not afraid to ask stupid questions, as long as I know how to do something. Some people need more assurance or guidance, and others take it up quickly.

My first day of training didn’t go well, so it was a good thing that I wasn’t the dependent type. My trainer was an older woman who was supposed to teach me how to do the easier things at Electric Umbrella — bussing, lettuce and tomato (which means standing in front of the char broiler, Nieco, and putting lettuce and tomato on the hamburger buns as they came out the bottom), and filler, mainly. Simple tasks, but made a bit more complicated by the trainer’s tendency to disappear.

I don’t remember what position we started with — it may have been bussing or even filler — but eventually we made our way to lettuce and tomato. After showing me the basics, my trainer left for her lunch break, leaving me alone in the kitchen during a rush. I worked in silence for a long while, simply doing what she had told me. I asked questions when they switched me somewhere else. When the rush died down, I found myself working both in front of Nieco (taking pre-made but not frozen hamburgers off the tray and putting them on the buns) and doing lettuce and tomato.