The Ride Delegate: Memoir of a Walt Disney World VIP Tour Guide (2 page)

There was a line for the eggrolls, because of course there was. It was just after 2pm in the afternoon so everyone in the Magic Kingdom was suddenly like, “we should totally get eggrolls in Adventureland.” It was about four guests deep, but I was so hungry. I looked at my watch. Five minutes. Plus the time of the wheelchair boat to unload, and then reload. So maybe eight minutes, tops. That’s all I could allow myself.

I placed myself at the end of the eggroll line. There was a kid and his mother standing in front of me, and the kid tugged on his mom’s sleeve and looked at me, confused, like I might yell at him for something he had done earlier somewhere in the park. The mother turned around to look at me. “Do you need to get by?” she asked, confused, since guests were always confused to see Cast Members freely roaming the park like I did so often.

“No, I’m hungry just like you!” I laughed, through gritted teeth, and prayed that this wouldn’t take long.

After what felt like forever, I reached the front of the eggroll line. I just wanted an eggroll. I looked into the eggroll case, and saw that there were no eggrolls left, only corn dogs. Whatever. I needed something to eat. “One corn dog, please,” I said to the Cast Member behind the counter, handing him my company-issued ID.

The Cast Member took my ID and looked at it. “No Cast Member discount,” he said.

“I know,” I replied, “One corn dog, please.”

The Cast Member looked at my ID picture, and then he looked at me. I knew that he had no idea what was going on. This Cast Member could not figure out why I, a Guest Relations Cast Member, was standing in front of him, clad in full costume, asking for a corn dog.

“I can’t take your dining discount here,” he said again.

“Do you know how to work a dining
card
?” I knew that my tone was harsh, and I didn’t mean for it to be. It was just bothersome that many Cast Members in the park looked at me like I must be crazy. I was not, in fact, crazy, I was just hungry, and tired, and hot, and cranky, and my guests were getting off of Jungle Cruise in less than three minutes and I needed to eat something.

The Cast Member shook his head. He didn’t know how to work a dining card.

“I can walk you through the whole thing. One corn dog, please. And a bottle of water. Then, hit total. In the bottom left hand corner of your screen you’ll see a button that says, ‘VIP TOUR DISCOUNT’. Hit that button. You’ll be prompted to swipe my ID. And just like magic, you’ll get two receipts and I’ll sign yours!” I had given that spiel so many time I was honestly surprised every time I met someone in Food and Beverage that didn’t know how to work a dining card. Like, are you new, kid?

Something clicked in the Cast Member’s mind, and like a bolt of lighting he had figured out who I was, and what role I was performing, and what I was doing, and just how hungry I was. Oh, a VIP dining card! But instead this guy said, “Oh, the system’s actually down. Cash only.”

I grunted, out loud, like I sometimes do when something really irks me. I was so hungry. I was thirsty. I had two minutes now to eat something and get back to Jungle Cruise before my guests got off of the attraction, if they weren’t off already. Sometimes that was the most embarrassing thing, to have guests disembark from the ride and not be standing there waiting for them. In this business, time is money.

The corn dog was staring me right in the face. I needed to eat it. Without thinking twice I reached into my purse and pulled out my wallet. I knew I had cash, I just didn’t really want to break the cash I had on me, which happened to be the “stickers” (tips) from the guests I had hosted the day before. “Can you break a $50?” I asked him, though it was really more of a command than an inquiry.

I shoved the change back into my bag, and with my corn dog and water in hand, I raced down to the exit of Jungle Cruise. I didn’t see my guests waiting there, so I probably had about thirty seconds to wolf down the entire corn dog, give or take. And boy, did I go to town on that corn dog, barely even registering that it was piping hot still, and it was a thousand degrees outside, and I was completely burning the roof of my mouth as I chewed furiously on it, but I was hungry and that’s all that mattered. I wonder how many guests looked over at me as I ate that corn dog at the exit of Jungle Cruise. I wonder what any of them thought. Did they think, look at that poised and proper VIP Tour Guide delicately eat that hot dog deep-fried on a stick? Or did they think, that Cast Member needs to be put out of her misery in a backstage location? Did they turn to their son or daughter and say, sweetie, you should aspire to be a Tour Guide so you can eat corn dogs at the exit of Jungle Cruise, too. Or did they just pity me. Pity the tour guide who was so hungry she made the bold decision to eat something on a stick in clear guest view because why not.

I know what I thought. I thought, my god, what life decisions have I made thus far to boil down to the fact that I am eating a corn dog, in full costume, on the clock, at the exit of Jungle Cruise?

The first time I visited Walt Disney World I was one-and-a-half years old, and according to my parents, trashcans, water fountains, and butter in the shape of Mickey Mouse fascinated me. Not a whole lot has changed. My mom, dad, and I stayed at Caribbean Beach, and it was during this vacation they learned that I suffered from horrible motion sickness because we needed to take a bus everywhere. Every day my mom dressed me in one outfit, and then by the time we reached our destination, she needed to change me into another one. We never stayed at Caribbean Beach again. From there on in it was Beach Club or bust. Before I turned eighteen I had visited Disney World sixteen times.

Every August it was customary for my family to head to Disney. I knew some of my friends found this tradition odd, because my family never went to the beach and we never took cross country road trips in an RV like so many of them did. We traded our beach vacation for Stormalong Bay, and we were all fine with that. My sisters and I all learned to swim in the kiddie pool there. I hated the way real sand felt in my hands because I was so conditioned to the artificial sand lining the bottom of that pool.

I lived and breathed everything Disney. Looking around my childhood bedroom you’ll find it completely cluttered with Disney knick-knacks and toys. There’s a crate of old park maps underneath my bed. I always had a current Disney World map right above my desk, so I could sit and do homework and stare at all the places I could visit in Magic Kingdom. I’d think about being in Disney World and my heart would literally long to be there. I had never felt such longing for a thing or a place before. I had an iTunes folder just full of Disney theme music. All I have to do is hear a few bars of “Moonlight Serenade”, and instantly I would be transported back to Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood Studios. When I smelled dry ice I thought of riding Winnie the Pooh. I cleaned my fish tank when it finally started to smell like the Living Seas. I found myself planning vacations for friends, with detailed itineraries and the best places to eat across property. At age 15, I was already a lexicon of Disney information.

As we walked through the park, my family used to joke about the perfect Disney job. We had conflicting ideas, since my mom wanted to work in the Emporium on Main Street and my youngest sister wanted to be a “Disney World vet” (this discussion happened pre-Animal Kingdom, when that dream became a reality). I just wanted to work at the Haunted Mansion, as the person who opened the doors to the attraction and told everyone to move into the dead center of the room. That seemed like the perfect job for me.

Years went by and every year we went to Disney. There was one summer when my mom was pregnant with my littlest sister, and the family went to Canada instead, and the middle sister and I complained that there weren’t “any rides”. I couldn’t comprehend a vacation without queues and fireworks and churros. There was also one year when my parents suggested we stay off Disney property at a timeshare in Orlando, and my sisters and I scoffed at the idea so much, my parents canceled the vacation. We didn’t go to Disney that year, either.

My post-college plans fell apart during the spring semester of my senior year and I no longer had a job. I didn’t have anything else lined up, and I needed to do something with my shiny new bachelor of science degree in communications. I started thinking about all of those Disney trips that my family had taken, and about how I had always wanted to be the person who opened the doors at Haunted Mansion, and I figured I didn’t have anything to lose. My mom always talked about how she and my dad regretted never being Cast Members for a short period of time after they were married. But then they had me, and they couldn’t just pick up and move to Orlando for the fun of it. I could.

I remember sitting in my tiny dorm room applying for the Disney College Program. I’ll always remember the senior seminar I was sitting in when my acceptance email for the College Program came through. I burst out of the lecture hall and called my mom, yelling into the phone that I was going to work at Haunted Mansion and my dreams were finally coming true. I wondered if I could stay at Disney forever, but that idea still seemed so far down the road. I told myself I’d stay until the magic wore off. Then I’d have to leave.

Flash-forward six months, and I was not assigned to work Haunted Mansion. Instead, I was assigned to work attractions at DisneyQuest. I wanted to leave. It was not magical.

DisneyQuest. The only attraction not in a park. The first few months of my college program are sort of a blur, because I cried a whole lot. I was devastated to be placed at DisneyQuest. I couldn’t understand how Disney could do that to me. Didn’t they know who I was? Didn’t they know that I had spent my whole life dreaming of working in a park, opening doors at the Haunted Mansion, directing parades, and collecting FastPasses? I had spent the entire summer leading up to my Disney immigration pretending to call through a queue line for a “party of two”!

I begged anyone who would listen to let me transfer roles. The thing about being a CP is that you can’t transfer roles no matter how many times you cry in your homeroom manager’s office. I really do owe a lot to the managers I had at DisneyQuest, because they helped me stop crying. They showed me that working at DisneyQuest wasn’t that bad, because I was out of the building every day by 11:30pm at the latest. They reminded me that I could be working in Magic Kingdom and pulling all-nighters for Extra Magic Hours. This was true. I did not want to be standing in Magic Kingdom at 3am. After a few months, I stopped crying and I learned to love DisneyQuest. That was my first Disney home.

I couldn’t stay at DisneyQuest forever, though. As my college program started winding down, my mom began asking me what I was going to do next. I figured I would stay at Disney, because it wasn’t like I had anything else lined up to do. Besides, I liked my job, I liked my friends, and I was having fun spending every waking moment hanging out at the parks. Disney World was my playground. I had free admission and I didn’t buy groceries so I could eat Casey’s Corner corn dog nuggets, my guilty pleasure and comfort food all rolled into one. When my program ended, I moved into an apartment in Orlando.

My managers at DisneyQuest suggested that I apply for Guest Relations. They thought I had the personality, and the thick skin, to be in a role like that. On a whim I applied, and a month later I found myself sitting in an interview for the role. A week later I got a phone call saying that I had been placed in a Guest Relations area. In nine months I had gone from crying hysterically in the DisneyQuest break room to the most desired and prestigious role in the parks.

You’ve probably seen me before. Maybe you were waiting in line somewhere on Disney property and happened to see a short little girl standing up ahead of you. Maybe you looked at her and thought, “it’s ninety six degrees outside, why is that person wearing what appears to be a wool vest and stockings? Why does she look so tired?” That was me. Maybe you were one of those guests who tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “What are you doing?” I might have given you a glossed-over explanation of a VIP tour and then handed you a business card, because I was not about to tell you my price-per-hour going rate to bypass the Peter Pan line while waiting in the Peter Pan line.

The true role of Guest Relations is a little hard to explain. In short, it encompasses everything. There were some days I sold admission tickets outside the park to guests who barely spoke English. There were other days when I stood at the Tip Board and guests would approach me and ask, “so… where are the rides?” Other days I booked dining reservations and recovered lost and found. One day I stood in Fantasyland for eight hours and told guests that they couldn’t enter Fantasyland that day. Some days I was told I needed to run through Frontierland in the rain with a wheelchair to recover a stranded guest.

In short, I used to say:
You know when like it rains, and the parade is canceled, and the guests want to go and yell at someone about that? I’m the person they’d come to yell at
.

The first Guest Relations host was Walt Disney himself. This was back at Disneyland, and Disneyland was Walt’s playground. He used to wander around the park and was more than happy to stop to explain anything to anyone; you just had to ask him to. Over time, there became such a demand for information, and knowledge, from Walt that he realized he couldn’t do it all by himself. He needed someone else, or a team of Cast Members, to be able to answer all of these questions.

The first Guest Relations hostess was a woman by the name of Cicely. She sold admission tickets from her little ticket booth outside of the park, and Walt noticed that her ticket line was always the longest. He couldn’t figure out why it took Cicely so long to sell day admissions. So Walt, being a true investigator, decided to sit in Cicely’s ticket booth and watch her sell tickets. Instead of just selling tickets, Cicely planned out detailed itineraries for guests as they entered the park, telling them what to see and do and where to eat. Walt realized he needed a department of Cast Members to handle just general questions and any concerns that might arise. Cicely was Guest Relations Cast Member #1.