Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations by Annie Salisbury

they were having fun and learning a lot. Meanwhile, I spent a much of my training sitting alone, in the breakroom, waiting for Whitney to come back.
    For Guest Relations, I needed to know everything. Absolutely everything. I needed to know the answer to every single question that a guest might ask, and if I didn’t know the answer, I had to figure out where I could find it. I can only imagine what would have happened to me if I didn’t come to the position with a ton of Disney knowledge. Whitney taught me jackshit.
    The next day wasn’t much better, even though I actually got to go out on the counter and interact with guests. As excited as I was, I was also terrified. I was terrified of saying the wrong thing to a guest, and making a situation way worse. Luckily, the first few guests I talked to only wanted things like buttons and dining reservations, and those were easy enough to do. Then, a guest came to me with a ticket question.
    I had been through the ticketing ATS training, yes, but sixty days ago. I hadn’t touched ATS since then, so let me be honest, I had forgotten just about everything. The guest handed me their tickets and told me they wanted to upgrade them to park hoppers.
    This is a pretty easy thing to do, and something I could still do in my sleep. But on day two, I had no idea how to upgrade tickets to add the park hopper option. I looked to Whitney.
    “Do you not know how to do this?” she asked like a Disney villain.
    “I do, I just don’t want to do it wrong,” I told her. “I haven’t fooled around in ATS since training.”
    “You don’t fool around in ATS. You do it. Ugh, move over.” She didn’t even give me time to move away from the computer, she hip-pushed me out of the way. She grabbed the tickets from my hand and started scanning them into the computer, so fast I could barely follow. She upgraded the tickets in less than three minutes and handed them back to the family.
    “Could you should me how you did that?” I asked, because I genuinely wanted to know.
    “Are you paying attention or not, Annie?” she yelled at me so loud everyone on the counter stopped working and looked over in our general direction.
    “I am paying attention! I just wanted to see you do it slower so I could follow!”
    “You can’t do things slow. You have to do things fast for the guests, because you get them in and out and back into the park. I’m not going to slow down my work habits just so you can keep up with them.”
    Was Whitney calling me stupid on the counter in front of guests and other cast members? She sure was. I’m surprised I didn’t cry. That’s not the only time she implied that I was slow, either. She at one point really called me “stupid”, but it was in a backstage location and seemed to be referring to my taste in Disney characters instead. I had a Mr. Incredible backpack, and Whitney looked at it and went, “That’s a little stupid, how old are you?”
    The third day wasn’t much better. Once again I’d hesitantly do things, not sure if I was doing them correctly, and Whitney would yell at me for that hesitation. I wasn’t looking to be coddled in this new role, but I was looking for some sort of feedback other than Whitney telling me I was a “moron” (it happened). Other cast members could see that I was clearly not having a good time, so they’d come over and talk to me as soon as Whitney disappeared for a smoke break. She’d leave me alone for hours at a time during this training, and you know what? It was fine. I was better off with no trainer than a trainer intent on ruining my day.
    These other cast members were nice. They’d show me how to do things, slowly, because I was training. They told me not to worry about Whitney and that she was always like this. They told me they actually called her “dementor” because, just like the evil spirits in Harry Potter , she could walk into a room and suck all the life out of it. It was a horrible joke to make about