Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations (18 page)

It was later in the evening, right around seven. It wasn’t dark yet, but the park was slowly clearing out and I happened to be the cast member standing in the right place at the right time when Manager Greg tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hey, van run?”

“I’m good, but thank you!”

“You’re the only one here, Annie.”

“UGH, REALLY?” Manager Greg was one of those managers who commanded little authority, so we could push back on him a little bit.

“It’ll be easy, I promise. You’re driving her to DAK Lodge. Drop her off, and I won’t even care if you swing by and get French fries on your way home.” The only McDonalds on property is right by Animal Kingdom, and sometimes, yes, the GR van came back smelling vaguely like French fries.

I grabbed the van and brought it over to the backside of First Aid. The woman sitting inside was maybe in her mid-60s, and she looked pale. She looked like she was dehydrated. One of the first-aid nurses gave her a few apple juice boxes, and I loaded her into the van. I already knew we were going to Animal Kingdom Lodge; I just didn’t know where.

There’s actually a back way to Animal Kingdom. Guests don’t know it’s there, and that’s a good thing. It’s a maintenance road, which bypasses most of World Drive. I thought about taking it, but then I realized I wanted to be gone from Magic Kingdom for a bit, so I might as well enjoy it, right?

I drove the long way to Animal Kingdom and flashed my badge at the security gate. The woman told me that she was staying in the DVC area of the resort, and I drove over that way. The DVC area is kind of big and not that pretty, if you’ve ever stayed there. The woman pointed at where I needed to go, and I pulled into one of the parking lots.

“You can just leave me here,” she said.

“No! I won’t leave you here! We’re so far away from the hotel! I’ll bring you to the entrance.” By the way, this was my first time to the DVC area of Animal Kingdom Lodge, ever. I had no idea where I was going. I didn’t realize there was actually a lobby area of the resort, since I had never been there. I assumed that the DVC area and the regular main building were connected, like the Boardwalk. I was wrong. When the woman pointed toward the vehicle entrance for me to go through, I drove into it.

This brought me down into the parking area underneath the hotel. The woman told me to drive to a door a little ways ahead, and I pulled over to drop her off. She thanked me, and I watched her get into the elevator.

Then I needed to leave.

I didn’t have enough space to put the van in reverse and drive out the way I had come in, so I needed to drive straight. This brought me into another little parking lot. There was a big sign that said EXIT and an arrow that pointed in one direction, and I figured I better follow that.

That EXIT and arrow sign brought me to another parking lot, and another area where I needed to drive underneath the DVC building. It dipped down a little bit, and there was a height restriction pole that told me I could enter only if my vehicle was less than nine feet, five inches.

And here’s me, a Guest Relations cast member, not knowing any better, and surely not knowing the height of the vehicle she’s currently driving. I drove toward this exit, and then I heard a CLUNK.

I stopped the van. I tried to go forward, but I could literally HEAR the metal bar scraping the top of the van. I was exactly nine feet, five inches. I feared the worst trying to drive forward, hitting a support beam in DVC and making the whole thing collapse. My only choice was to back up and try a different way, and I did so with such ease. I was already jammed under the pole, so I inched backwards as slowly as I could. The pole still scraped across the top. Hopefully no one would ever look at the roof of the GR van and wonder, “Who the hell scratched this all up?”

After roughly a 45-point turn, I had managed to reverse the direction of the vehicle. I wasn’t really
supposed
to drive back the way I had come in, but this was a desperate time. That was the only way I could exit, since I wasn’t exactly supposed to have driven the van in here, anyway.

Thankfully, no one tried to drive through the first-floor parking lot while I was driving through it with a giant 15-passenger van.

By the time I had made it out of the underbelly of Animal Kingdom Lodge, I had been gone for an hour now. Greg was going to start to wonder where I was. I figured that now would be the perfect time to take the shortcut to Magic Kingdom.

To get to the shortcut, I needed to drive through backstage areas of Animal Kingdom. The backside of Animal Kingdom is just one giant loop. You enter it right behind the Rainforest Café, and you drive it all the way around to the other side, where you’ll find DINOSAUR. Just behind Kali River Rapids there’s an exit route, which would lead me directly to the Magic Kingdom shortcut.

The cast members at the DAK security booth didn’t question why I was pulling into Animal Kingdom. I had a Disney ID, and I was dressed for Guest Relations. I looked like I belonged. They waved me through, and I began my drive around the backside of the park. It’s a nice scenic drive, and sometimes you can see animals, too.

Or, it would have been a nice scenic drive, except that as I approached this exit gate, I realized it was closed. Completely closed. The barricade was up, the gate was shut and locked, and the guard booth was empty. I couldn’t exit out here.

That’s when I remembered that Animal Kingdom is a lame park that closes at 5pm, so
of course
this gate would be closed, too. It was just after 8pm now. No one was in the park anymore.

I couldn’t very well do a U-turn on this road, so I had to drive all the way around to DINOSAUR. That’s where I reversed the vehicle and then doubled back through the park. I exited out the front. After this, I had to drive the same way I had come in. Down Buena Vista, then over onto World Drive, then down World Drive, and finally into the back side of Magic Kingdom.

By the time I arrived at the park, it was 9:30. I had been gone for over two hours. Greg was standing in the Bank Out Room when I came rushing in, panting, out of breath, because I had just run from the van’s parking spot in Tomorrowland.

“I thought you went home. I really did. I was going to call you,” he said, as I handed him back the keys.

“I got stuck at Animal Kingdom.”

“No one gets ‘stuck’ at Animal Kingdom,” Greg called over his shoulder as he walked away.

Do you remember the Skyway? It’s OK if you don’t. It wasn’t around in the Magic Kingdom for all that long, but it’s a perfect example as to why things come and go so frequently at the parks.

The Skyway was your typical gondola attraction that spanned from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland. The Fantasyland station was located right next to “small world” (it’s now where the Tangled bathrooms are; there used to be a big hill there, and I always thought that the loading station was Pinocchio themed). The Tomorrowland station used to sit above the bathrooms next to Space Mountain, and there was a waterfall going from the top down into the pool below. Anyone remember this? I have very faint memories of it. The attraction opened with the park, and it was closed down and removed in 1999 for a few reasons.

Back when the park opened, in 1971, no one was thinking about wheelchair accessibility. Disney World was thinking more about “RIDES! RIDES! RIDES!” The Skyway attraction was located in Disneyland, too, and so the same thing was brought over to MK. It was installed, it opened. And then it ran into a lot of problems.

All attractions at Magic Kingdom — heck, all the parks — have to be in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Basically, this means that every single attraction has to be wheelchair accessible, or Disney could be hit with a ton of fines. If you’ve noticed over the past few years, more and more wheelchair-accessible vehicles are popping up all over the parks. Before, with things like Haunted Mansion, the attraction would simply have to stop so a wheelchair guest could transfer from their wheelchair into one of the Doombuggies. But now with rides like Buzz Lightyear and even Winnie the Pooh, guests can travel right into a wheelchair accessible vehicle, no transferring involved. It’s really awesome.

The best of these wheelchair vehicles is the one at Jungle Cruise, because it is incredibly fascinating to watch how wheelchairs move on and off the boat. Check it out next time you’re waiting in a long Jungle Cruise ride.

When Magic Kingdom opened, it wasn’t ADA compliant, since wheelchair accessibility just wasn’t a big issue back then. However, it soon became a big issue, and Disney
needed
to comply with it.

Skyway was, technically, always wheelchair accessible. So if you happened to be traveling in a wheelchair, and wanted to ride the Skyway, you could. You wouldn’t be turned away. You would have to transfer out of your wheelchair into one of the gondolas, though. You would board without your wheelchair, and then sail away high above Fantasyland on your way to Tomorrowland.

But what about your wheelchair?

That’s where some poor, unfortunate cast member comes in. As soon as you boarded your gondola, one cast member had to literally run your wheelchair from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland, or vice versa. Because can you imagine disembarking the gondola in another land and not having your wheelchair waiting for you? And then being told that you needed to take a return trip back to the previous land to go and get it? Disney wasn’t going to let that happen. So they would accommodate the guest, while giving some unlucky cast member their workout.

Needless to say, this became a problem.

Eventually, it was decided that the Skyway would have to go away, just because it could never fall into true ADA compliance with an actual wheelchair vehicle.

However, that’s not the only reason it went away.

Imagine getting into one of the Skyway vehicles and traveling the five minutes or so it took to get to the other land. OK, now imagine that a freak Orlando rain shower suddenly strikes, and you are still sitting in your gondola. There was literally no way for guests to be evacuated during these rainstorms in less than five minutes. Now imagine it’s lightning, and you’re still sitting in your gondola, and now it’s a huge safety risk. Imagine that the power goes out, and there’s no way to evacuate you down, and you’re just trapped in a gondola high above Fantasyland. Disney didn’t want to take that risk.

Also, traveling in these gondolas you got a great view of the rooftop of buildings. That was the only view. Sure, you had a bird’s eye view of some of the lands, but mostly you were just looking at the tops of Fantasyland buildings and the Speedway. The attraction wasn’t that exciting, and it was honestly more of a headache than anything else.

Its support structures were also ugly as hell. They were just giant, metal poles sticking out of the ground. They were huge. They made it difficult to get around during busy seasons. And since Skyway stretched between two very different lands, the gondolas couldn’t be themed to one or the other.

Finally, it was decided that it was too much of a hassle to deal with, and the Skyway went away.

Even though I was a full-fledged Guest Relations cast member, and I was doing my GR work perfectly fine, and the managers loved me, I was still getting barely any hours. It was a magical moment anytime I received more than thirty hours a week. I realized I needed to make myself more valuable to the area, so they’d give me more hours. I decided I wanted to audition to give a tour.

No, not a VIP tour. That’s a completely different story. Magic Kingdom offers guided walking tours through the park. The big one is the Keys to the Kingdom tour that’s five hours long and takes you into the Utilidor. That’s the crème de la crème tour of the park. I really wanted to audition for that one, but I felt like it was still a little too far out of my reach. Instead, I decided to audition for the Family Magic tour, which was a two-hour tour through the park, aimed at kids between the ages of 3 and 12, and run like a giant scavenger hunt.

When the tour was first created, you had a giant map, like a treasure map, and Peter Pan actually came with you on the tour — sometimes Wendy, too. How cool is that? You’re doing a tour through Magic Kingdom, and Peter and Wendy both join you. Kids loved it, because it was geared toward the age where they still believed these people were the real deal. Parents loved it, because how can you not love seeing your kid race through Magic Kingdom with Peter Pan by his side?

So you followed this giant map, to gather up all these clues, and you actually rode a few rides with Peter and Wendy, and in the end everything was retrieved from Captain Hook and it was a job well done.

Eventually, the Entertainment Department decided that they didn’t like the idea of Peter and Wendy being on the tour. Since they were on the tour, they couldn’t be anywhere else in the park during that time, because of character integrity (which translates to, only one Peter can be out on stage at any one time, because there is only one Peter Pan). Entertainment decided to cut the characters out of it, and the Family Magic tour lost the thing that really made it special.

Entertainment was still willing to share a little bit, and offered up a quick meet and greet with Peter instead. So, the tour would happen — sans Peter — but halfway through, we still met up with Peter, took a few pictures, and everyone would go on their merry way. OK, it wasn’t too bad. However, the entire Family Magic tour had to be rewritten at this point.

I don’t know who rewrote the tour. It happened before my time as a guide. But whoever rewrote it had never done a scavenger hunt before, nor did they realize what it was like to be a kid anymore, because the tour was so confusing, and so convoluted, it barely even made sense to me. And I was an adult, not a four year old.

This is what the tour became: a choose-your-own-adventure scavenger hunt. Except, I didn’t realize that when I auditioned for the tour, and then trained for the tour.

Family Magic relied solely on the guide hosting the tour. As guides, we needed to make up a “story” as to why we had these clues, and why we needed to go find all of these things hidden in the park. For the most part, the clues, and the coinciding story, made about zero sense. Plus, we had to work Mickey Mouse in there somehow, since the last clue led us to the Mickey Mouse meet and greet down at the beginning of Main Street, where we “had to give everything back to the boss”. That’s an actual line from the Family Magic tour, because I’ve got this thing consigned to memory still. It’s something I’m never going to be able to shake.