Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations (16 page)

Dad thought this over for a second, clearly doing some quick math in his head. “Oh yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Just one day of park tickets?”

“Oh, gosh no. You don’t come to Disney on vacation and only spend one day. How many days were you here for this trip?”

“Five.”

“Do you have park hoppers?”

“What’s that?”

“Can you go to more than one park in a day?”

“Yes.”

“And how many people are with you right now?”

“Well, my wife, two kids, and her parents. So, six of us.”

“OK, I’m going to set you guys up for six, 5-day park hoppers for whenever you come back to Disney.”

“Really?” Dad was shocked.

“Really
really
.”

He had to fill out a little bit of paperwork for me, and I had to input all of his information into my computer. While he did that, I went to go find a coordinator to approve that I was giving him six, 5-day park hoppers (the most I could do without approval was 2-day park hopper tickets).

I stuck my head into the Bank Out Room, “I need a coordinator.”

Whitney stuck her head out from the VIP Room. “Oh, are you dealing with the kid who peed on Pirates?” (How many times have you asked that question at
your
job?)

“I just need you to approve what I’m doing for him.”

“Does he want to talk to me?” Whitney stood up, brushing crumbs from her dinner off her skirt.

“No, I’ve already helped him. I just need your ID and password to put the file into the system.”

“Uh, what are you doing for him?” Whitney asked, attitude level: high.

“Tickets to come back.” Decided not to tell her how many just yet.

“Oh, okay.”

She followed me out to the counter and I led her over to my computer. Dad had finished filling out all the paperwork for me, as Whitney looked over my shoulder. I finally got to the part where I had to note how many tickets, and what kind of tickets, and that’s when Whitney forcefully poked me in the side.

“Six tickets?
Five-day
tickets?” She snarled into my ear.

“His son peed on Pirates,” I said loudly enough for both her and Dad to hear. “How about this kid
not
grow up having this incident be his only memory of Disney World?”

“Thank you,” Dad said as sincerely as possible, and he meant it. Whitney couldn’t argue with that.

Dad left a few minutes later with some Mickey stickers and also passes for ice cream, since I told him the entire family needed ice cream. He didn’t object to that. He also left with a file number, so next time he found himself at Disney his tickets would be taken care of. I watched him exit of City Hall, and then Whitney grabbed me by the wrist.

“I get that his son had a small freak-out on a ride, but can you
not
do things like that anymore?” she semi-yelled at me.

“What would you have done?” I semi-yelled back.

“Like, three FastPasses for tomorrow, tops.”

“Next time a kid pees on a ride, we’ll save him for you!” One of the other cast members down the counter yelled at us. Thankfully, there were not other kids peeing on rides, at least that I knew of.

On top of working in City Hall, I could also work at the window.

Working at the window came a little ways down the road. It wasn’t for brand-new guest relations cast members. Think City Hall, but turn up that intensity to 11. The thing about the window was that I still had to deal with the same crazy guest situations, but the guests weren’t in the park yet. All guests want to do is get into the park. So if they’re standing at my window, they are more than likely really, really mad about something.

My window trainer was a friend of Whitney’s who was just as mean and catty, and seemed to care about 10% less. Instead of wandering away for hours and leaving me alone, this girl, Diana, stood next to me the entire time and played games on her phone. She at least didn’t call me stupid or slow, so that was nice.

The window is located outside of the Magic Kingdom. If you’re approaching the Magic Kingdom, it’s on the right side of the park entrance. It’s that little white building you see, with a big sign out front that reads WILL CALL. You could pick up your tickets at the window, or purchase some if you didn’t have any. You could also do other things, like book dining reservations and ask general questions, but those instances were few and far between. Everything about the window was tickets.

The window was set up like a regular box office. Imagine the last movie theater you went to, and what the box office looked like there. That’s how the window looked. There were eight little cubby stations, each with a computer and a high chair to sit on. In front of the computer, a glass window with two holes in it, one to speak through, one to slide money and tickets through on the bottom.

It was horribly difficult to hear at the window, and I think Disney did that on purpose. While I could hear everything the guests were saying outside, they couldn’t necessarily hear me talking to them inside, unless I was practically yelling. If I needed to talk to a guest I had to hoist myself on my elbows and lean into the window and talk directly through the hole. Sometimes a guest would physically put their entire ear up to the hole, because even with me yelling, they still couldn’t hear a single thing.

This did, however, make it easy to talk about things with the other cast members inside the window, and not have the guests hear our conversations.

All transactions at the window were separated into two categories: easy and hard. There was nothing in between.

The easy transactions were those in which guests would come up and purchase tickets. It was a simple thing to do. I’d ask how many were in their party, and if they had any children between the ages of 3 and 9 with them. I’d ask if they wanted one day or multiple days, and I punched those numbers into a computer in front of me. I gave them a final price, they gave me a credit card, and it was the easiest thing in the world. Sometimes the guests would want to add something like the park hopper option to their ticket, and that was easy enough to do, too. I liked these simple transactions.

The hard transactions varied. A guest might have booked their vacation through Southwest travel, but never got a confirmation number telling them that their tickets were at will call. But here they were, at will call, with a photo ID, looking for their tickets. Oh, but they left the credit card they used to purchase the vacation package at home. Oh, and the wife’s last name is different from the husbands, and they’re not sure whose name they booked it under in the first place. And also, great aunt Susan was going to come with them on this trip, but she had to cancel at the last second, so can I refund her ticket? Oh, and also they’ve got reservations at the Castle for lunch in 15 minutes so they need their tickets right now because they’ve got to get into the park.

That’s a hard situation.

I had a million easy situations that were all basically the same thing. Guest wants tickets, I sell them tickets. As for the hard situations, no two were ever the same. Even though I thought I had seen everything after a while, ticket situations continued to surprise me time and time again.

There was this one dad who came up to my window and handed me a stack of plastic Disney tickets that he had purchased at the Disney Store. That was common enough. However, the woman who sold them to him at the Disney Store never activated the tickets for him. He paid for them, but the plastic tickets he had were just shells — nothing was on them.

When this dad handed me the tickets and the receipt, I could see that he had purchased them, obviously. When I swiped them into the computer, there was nothing there. The tickets showed that they were empty.

“This is what she gave you?” I asked through the window hole.

“Is there something wrong?” he asked back. I hated making guests worry about things, especially tickets. I didn’t want to freak this guest out just yet.

“Oh, no, everything’s fine. Can I borrow your credit card?”

He hesitantly slid it to me underneath the glass.

I had his receipt that showed he had purchased the tickets. I could see on his receipt that the ticket numbers matched the tickets I had in front of me. When I swiped his credit card into the computer, it showed that a purchase had been made at the Disney Store. But, the bottom line was that the cast member there never activated the tickets. And there was no way for me, now, to activate the tickets.

I couldn’t delete the tickets, and then rebuy them for him, because the tickets technically didn’t exist. I couldn’t do anything with the ticket shells, because they thought they already had tickets on them. To make all of this even more complicated, he was traveling from Canada, so everything was also in a completely different currency, and I couldn’t figure out how to even refund his money to the Canadian dollar, and then purchase them all again.

“Should I get my wife?” he asked.

“Oh, no no. I can fix this. I think. Are you sure the cast member at the Disney Store didn’t give you anything else?” Maybe she had accidentally given him the correct tickets, too. And now here he was, giving me the wrong ones.

“This is all she gave me. The tickets and the receipts. What’s wrong?”

“Well, these aren’t exactly tickets right now.”

The guest’s face dropped.

“But, but I can make them tickets! See, OK, actually, I have no idea what went wrong when you purchased these tickets. But like, you bought them. But, the girl at the Disney Store never made them tickets. So these are just, like, fake plastic tickets right now, and don’t have real tickets on them.”

“So, did I just lose all this money?” Guests are always so concerned about money, and losing money, so yes, Disney is a great place to go.

“No, I can fix this. Just hold on.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Has anyone ever had to deal with ticket shells and a purchase receipt where the tickets aren’t actually showing up? He purchased them at a Disney Store in Canada.”

“In Canada?” One of the coordinators looked up at me. “Didn’t you get that email about the bug in the tickets from Canadian Disney Stores?” Every single day I’d get 3–15 emails about things that were going wrong with tickets in the system. And no, I never read them. So yes, I was unaware that there was actually a thing going on with Disney Store tickets from Canada.

“What can I do?”

“Nothing. The guest has to go back to that Disney Store and get his money refunded there.”

“He’s already paid for them.”

“There’s nothing you can do. You can’t refund the money here; it’s not our ticket system. It’s also Canadian money and I am not converting that for you.”

The tickets were supposed to be for six days. Four tickets. Two adults and two children. That’s a lot of money tied up in tickets. I didn’t want to have to tell the guest that the tickets he had already purchased were bad, and that there was nothing I could do to fix them. Oh, and if you still want to come in to Disney, you have to buy brand-new tickets.

“What’s wrong?” this guest asked again.

“This is a bug in our system right now.” I tried to be as honest with guests as possible, and always blame Disney for things that were going wrong, “The tickets you bought aren’t reading in the system, so you can’t use them to go in. You’re going to have to go back to the Disney Store where you bought them and ask for a refund. I promise they’ll do it!”

“What am I supposed to do right now?”

“Ummmmmmm…. Buy new tickets?” I felt awful saying it, but it was the only thing he could do.

By this point, the mom had realized something was wrong because everything was taking too long. She appeared in the window, holding a small child in her arms, dressed in red for Minnie Mouse. “What’s wrong?” Mom asked Dad.

“I’m going to fix your tickets, hold on,” I said to her, so Dad didn’t even have to answer. “Just give me a second. I’m going to fix this.”

The only way to fix it was to have Dad buy new tickets for everyone. But that’s a shitty way to fix things. It’s not his fault that the computer system has a bug, and he’s from Canada, and the tickets he bought in Canada aren’t working right now. I could see that he had paid for them. That wasn’t an issue.

It killed me to make guests rebuy things because of Disney, and this family was cute, and the little girl dressed up as Minnie Mouse was maybe two years old at most, so she didn’t even need a ticket, anyway. I told Dad that. He nodded, like he understood, but also he had no idea what I was doing to try and fix the situation.

What I was doing was simple: I was printing him out brand-new tickets to go into Magic Kingdom, and all the other parks, too. I had no idea if his original tickets were park hoppers, but whatever. I gave him park hoppers, because why not. I printed him out two adult tickets and one child ticket. I slid them underneath the glass.

“When you go back home, take this receipt, and these plastic tickets, and go ask for your money back. These tickets don’t work. The computer system at the Disney Store will see that they haven’t been used, and they will of course give you your money back. I promise.”

“So what are we supposed to use to go in?” Mom adjusted the child in her arms.

I slid the new tickets toward them. “Use these. There are two adult tickets, and one child ticket. She doesn’t need one, she’s too young!” I said, pointing at the little girl who gave me a big toothless grin.

“How much do we owe you for these?” Dad fumbled with his wallet.

“Don’t worry about it. They’re on Mickey, because he messed up. Just go into Magic Kingdom now, OK?”

Mom and Dad looked at each other, clearly confused. “But you told us to go get our money back for these tickets.”

“Yeah, those tickets are bad, don’t use them. Go get your money back.”

“And these tickets are…?” Mom pointed at the new ones.

“Those are your tickets for this vacation. On Mickey. You don’t owe me anything, because it’s his fault your tickets got messed up in the first place. You’ve already spent too much time here at the window, now go!” I playfully waved my hand through the hole in the window, signaling them to get the hell out of there. Neither one of them questioned it any further.