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

and went. No sign of my trainer. I awkwardly walked over to ask the general teller — get it, because it was the Bank Out Room, and Magic Kingdom Guest Relations (MKGR) was whole-hog for the “bank theme” (and also the general teller had all of the money) — if they had seen my trainer. They had not. They checked the call-in log to see if she had called in. She had not. So I continued to wait.
    Right off the Bank Out Room was another room, the VIP Room. It was a tiny Victorian-style room, slightly in shambles because no one had bothered to renovate it over the years. It’s not like the VIP room was high up on the refurbishment list. And since it got used quite often, MKGR couldn’t just close it down for a week, anyway.
    Originally, the room was meant to house “VIPs”, but VIPs never used it. Who did? MKGR cast members who wanted to hide for a few minutes, sit down, charge their phones, and not do anything. It was also sometimes used for screaming, irate guests who began to cause a scene in front of other guests. Parade meet and greets occasionally took place in there as well. It was MKGR’s every purpose rumpus room.
    I sat down on one of the green couches and waited. And waited. Around 4:30pm, the general teller called out to me, “Whitney said she’s on her way!” Not bothering to tell me where Whitney had been, and how long it would take her to get to me.
    Around 4:45, she showed up. She threw open the back door to City Hall with such force, I could hear it bang against the opposite wall. “Where is she?” Whitney barked at whoever was standing in the Bank Out Room at the time.
    Someone must have pointed at the VIP room, because moments later Whitney’s head came through the door. “I forgot I was training you. Are you ready?” she asked, not bothering to apologize for being so late, not bothering to ask if I had been mildly traumatized after waiting for an hour, not bothering to do any of the normal things I bet a normal City Hall trainer with do with their trainee at the start of a shift.
    I nodded, and followed Whitney out of the room.
    I’ll save you the struggle of having to figure this out on your own: Whitney hated me. To this day, I still have no idea why Whitney hated me so much. She hadn’t forgotten about training me in City Hall, she purposely decided she didn’t feel like doing it. Someone else told me later that day that Whitney had been down in the Mousekateria enjoying a long lunch and when it came time to start my training shift, she just decided not to do it. Finally, after the general teller called a manager, that manager then called Whitney to ask her why she wasn’t handling her trainee.
    I feel like her intent was to scare me away from Guest Relations so I’d wind up leaving my spot and heading back to Great Movie Ride. It was as if Whitney was intentionally sending me into awful situations, not to prepare me for what was to come later, but to terrify me. Most of it worked. The four days I spent with her were hell. But then again, it better prepared me for later.
    That first night we didn’t do anything. I was still incredibly eager to get in and learn everything . Whitney had her heart set on not teaching me much, and also taking a two-hour lunch break. There were required readings for GR, so she sat me in the break room upstairs with a big binder, told me to read everything cover to cover, and then disappeared for two hours. When she came back, she asked me if I had taken my dinner break, and I was like, “Um, no, you told me to read all of this and also instilled lots of fear in me, so I didn’t take my lunch break.” Whitney rolled her eyes, huffed, and said, “Take it now, I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”
    I was supposed to split my training: half out on the counter, half learning things from Whitney through virtual training and walks through the park. I know this is what was supposed to happen because I watched other new GR cast members do it. They looked like