My Disney Adventures- A Cast Member and Beyond
taythegibs
Posts: 2,025 ✭
This thread is to tell of my adventures at Walt Disney World (WDW), my Senior trip in high school (May 2009), centering around my Employment from August 2010- May 2011, and primarily in my future employment from August 2012- January 2013? I have had several of my fellow BOTL and SOTL's ask me about my experiences so i decided to share them here. Please don't quote my whole posts to keep the clutter down, i will try to post many pictures about things ive done.
My first trip to WDW was back in the early nineties when i was a small child, and I dont remember any of it, i never went back till the early 2000's when i visited several times with my family and we pretty much did everything.
Fast forward to May 2009 and my Senior trip. I went to a small high school with a graduating class of just 113, eighty of who went on the Senior Trip to WDW. (Unfortunately I have lost all of my pictures of this trip due to a hard drive crash.) The most memorable event for me during the trip was when we went to the Magic Kingdom for the first time, it was a couple of days into the trip and i had been alternating between a group of guys i hung out with and a group of girls, but being the only one with real knowledge of the parks i was the "tour guide" (actually the reason i wanted to work for disney in the first place). On this day the two groups were hanging out together, and after a couple of hours we were halfway through the park, but we kept having to stop because part of the group would get cut off so, knowing we had picked up a few stragglers, i decided to turn and count the group... there were Forty One kids from my high school, half the dang class! Now, being the mature kid i was, i talked a few of my friends (mostly girls) into sprinting away from everybody else while they regrouped. On my que we took off around either side of the carousel and through the crowd ending our fight to freedom in the que line for the Haunted mansion. Granted this lead to us getting angry calls and texts from our classmates, but a group of 8 is a LOT easier to manage than a group of forty. the day lead on like this and we ended up with a dozen or so when we watched the fireworks at the end of the night.
The trip was fun, we went to all four parks, downtown Disney, and a water park, ate lots of great food, and i learned how to text (true story, ended up making 400 texts on the trip home while my crush at the time was curled up against me dozing.)
My older sister participated in the Disney College program in 2008 (DisneyCollegeProgram.com), i never really thought much of it because i never saw her when she was home and she always complained about working at WDW. After the trip i really started looking into working for Disney, at least on a temporary basis. I looked into the Career Start Program, and the College program but ended up going with the college program so that i would get a year of college under my belt before i left.
To Be Continued....
My first trip to WDW was back in the early nineties when i was a small child, and I dont remember any of it, i never went back till the early 2000's when i visited several times with my family and we pretty much did everything.
Fast forward to May 2009 and my Senior trip. I went to a small high school with a graduating class of just 113, eighty of who went on the Senior Trip to WDW. (Unfortunately I have lost all of my pictures of this trip due to a hard drive crash.) The most memorable event for me during the trip was when we went to the Magic Kingdom for the first time, it was a couple of days into the trip and i had been alternating between a group of guys i hung out with and a group of girls, but being the only one with real knowledge of the parks i was the "tour guide" (actually the reason i wanted to work for disney in the first place). On this day the two groups were hanging out together, and after a couple of hours we were halfway through the park, but we kept having to stop because part of the group would get cut off so, knowing we had picked up a few stragglers, i decided to turn and count the group... there were Forty One kids from my high school, half the dang class! Now, being the mature kid i was, i talked a few of my friends (mostly girls) into sprinting away from everybody else while they regrouped. On my que we took off around either side of the carousel and through the crowd ending our fight to freedom in the que line for the Haunted mansion. Granted this lead to us getting angry calls and texts from our classmates, but a group of 8 is a LOT easier to manage than a group of forty. the day lead on like this and we ended up with a dozen or so when we watched the fireworks at the end of the night.
The trip was fun, we went to all four parks, downtown Disney, and a water park, ate lots of great food, and i learned how to text (true story, ended up making 400 texts on the trip home while my crush at the time was curled up against me dozing.)
My older sister participated in the Disney College program in 2008 (DisneyCollegeProgram.com), i never really thought much of it because i never saw her when she was home and she always complained about working at WDW. After the trip i really started looking into working for Disney, at least on a temporary basis. I looked into the Career Start Program, and the College program but ended up going with the college program so that i would get a year of college under my belt before i left.
To Be Continued....
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1. online application
2. Online Interview
3.Phone Interview (If the online interview was passed)
4. WAITING...yes, the waiting is torturous, It averages one month.
5. Acceptance/ Denial
After i was accepted into the College program for The fall of 2010 i read everything i could on the program, i watched hundreds of hours of youtube videos and vlogs, i read dozens of blogs, and i immersed myself into the Facebook groups for the CP's
I was accepted into the program as a custodial Cast Member which I had expected because of my previous experience as the maintenance person at a youth camp the last summer, an i would be returning for the summer of 2010. When you are accepted you learn what you will be doing (custodial/attractions/quick service food/ full service food/character attendant/etc...) but not where you will be working, so i knew that i would work Custodial but i had no idea where, on the 40+/- sq miles of property i would be working. Time flew by for me but before i knew it it was August and I was about to move to Florida!
It took me forever to pack, here i had nearly everything other than my clothes laid out-
The morning we left! the truck all packed up
to be continued...
Back to the story; I made it to Orlando!
Check in day was crazy, it was the 7th of August at about 7 in the morning. My sister, who had made the day long drive with me two days before, dropped me off in front of the building where i began the paperwork, two hours later i was in my apartment... It hit me that i was going to be living away from home, for the first time ever, for the next five months. The apartment complex I moved into was called Patterson Court and i was in "The 8107" as we would end up affectionately calling it. It was a three bedroom, mostly furnished apartment with six complete strangers; it was great.
A few hours after moving into the apartment they loaded us onto buses and took us off to the casting building where they did background checks, made sure we had the appropriate "Disney Look," assigned us Debit cards into which our paychecks would be deposited, and found out where we would be working! My favorite park was always EPCOT so i was VERY excited when I was assigned to Epcot, Future World (the front half of the park) for custodial.
After we returned to casting we had to go to a meeting that went over the rules and regulations of the housing where we got to ask questions and got goodie bags of laundry detergent, trash bags, and other little things that you would need but a lot of people seem to forget.
after i got caught in a Florida "summer shower" on the walk back to my apartment, i drove over to Downtown Disney to meet up with my sister for dinner since she was flying back later that evening.
To Be Continued-
A Day off, went shopping, and got to know the roommates a bit more.
Day 3:
This was the day i had been waiting for, i would finally become a "Cast Member!" I had to be at the bus stop at 6:30 am to catch a bus to Disney University aka Dis/Disney U, so that i could take the 8am traditions class and get my nametag!
So, after some stuff that im not supposed to talk about, and learning a whole lot about the company; I left with a Disney id, a name tag, and a little Donald Duck i won during obscure Disney trivia.
Starting work-
Training took about a week, custodial has white Costumes (all uniforms at Disney are called costumes and you get them at... Costuming) which was explained to us as the fact that Walt Disney's wift thought that all theme parks were dirty (which was true) so Walt decided to be completely different, he wanted his parks to be known as the cleanest theme parks around. The white costumes were so that guests would see that even the people cleaning were clean, and if your costume gets dirty enough during your shift you are required to get a new one and change.
The group i worked with most days at FW EPCOT
and my lovely face, these are the only two pictures i have of myself in costume.
To Be Continued...again...Ill try to get this all done soon but with my attempting to write again coupled with work and getting ready to move back to florida/go on vacation it is slow going.
For guests there are smoking areas scattered throughout the parks and in what is known as Downtown Disney there is actually a placd called Sosa family cigar co (or something similar) where i bought my first cigars. Downtown disney has no real regulations against smoking so i will probably find a bench out of the way to use when im there which will be pretty often.
You ever bang the whimsy out of a princess so hard that she can't whistle anymore?
with all due respect, of course
but really, there are many things i cant talk about for legal reasons, or personal reasons... even if i might want to.
So last night l was on my break in pirates and there was a commotion in the tower so we all went over and discovered that there was a couple on one of the boats that the guy was about to propose on during the ride, we watched them on the monitors as they went around and witnessed the proposal! after we saw that she said yes 4 of us pirates, a manager, and a coordinator all ran down to unload to welcome the newly engaged couple back! we applauded as they came into the station and had them walk through a "sword tunnel" then they got the Just engaged buttons and a No Strings attached form for a free ice cream! Later that night i saw them again and gave the girl my sword as a memento and to "help keep him in line" It's events like this that make working for Disney such a wonderful experience!
Sounds like you're having a great time, glad to hear it (other than being sick of course).
Hope you feel better soon.
* I have a new address as of 3/24/18 *
It's nice to see you enjoying your time there, I thought for sure when I clicked on this I'd be reading some rants from a disgruntled person...stuff I wouldn't care to read.