Being a Walt Disney World Cast Member gives you certain skills, and they’re not always the ones you would expect. Yes, I can drive a Jungle Cruise boat, but I can also disable basically any ECV in existence, so I can move it. I know how to talk to a crowd loud enough, that they can hear me without it sounding like I’m screaming, and, I can get that crowd to go where I need them to.
Weirdly enough, this article has been sitting in my drafts since June 2018, and I hadn’t gotten around to finishing it until now. I was inspired to finish it by this post that’s been floating around Facebook now. Normally I’d crop the name out for privacy, but this guy went to effort to add his title, so I want him to get his credit.
Now everything I list here isn’t necessarily something you can put on a resume, and even if you could, I’m not sure how you’d word it. My point is that there are skills that you have, that you may not even realize you have, and those skills may help you find something to make ends meet, or a new career path entirely, like it did for me.
I was an Attractions and Operations Cast Member. I worked at the World Famous Jungle Cruise, and Pirates of the Caribbean. I also picked up stroller parking and support shifts in Fantasyland a couple of times, and worked a handful of shifts at Fantasmic. I never worked in another line of work at Disney, so I can’t speak to any other roles and skills that might come with those.
Sadly, I have no Cast Member pictures that aren’t of me in khaki. (Meaning, I have no pictures from working at Pirates, or any of the other random shifts I picked up.)
Attractions Cast Members are obsessed with safety and efficiency, above all else. I want to get 29 people in the boat, and send it in less than 55 seconds. It’s a race and a game, but you have to do it safely, or not do it all. It was something I was extremely good at, and prided myself on.
Fun Fact: This is actually how Jay and I met. It takes two Skippers to load a Jungle Cruise Boat. There was a brand-new Skipper I’d never seen before, and he was actually keeping up with me. This led to a first impression I will never live down: “I like you, you don’t suck.” This even made it into both our wedding vows. (That we didn’t show each other in advance!)
Alright, onto the list!
- We speak in acronyms and abbreviations. A lot of Disney abbreviations get used online to the point that blogs have guides to them. However, we use them in real life. I say DAK, as one word, not the letters, rhymes with snack, as often as I say Animal Kingdom. Now the TTC can’t be turned into a word so I say the letters T-T-C. Hall of Presidents is referred to as The Hop. Attraction codes also come into use frequently. If something is 101, it’s down or closed, whether that’s for technical difficulties or weather. I have referenced my car being 101. A 103 is the code for bathroom break. Jay and I use this to the point that our dog has figured this out, because when I say, “I think Fiona needs a 103,” she now gets as excited as when I used to say, “I think Fiona needs outside.” I also put the numbers 103 on the door to our downstairs bathroom, because I think I’m hilarious.
- I have a tendency to speak in radio codes, but I blame Universal more for this one, than Disney. My best friend Lacey passed this trait on to me. I’ve said, “10-4” for affirmative more than once, and “54” for negative. The good news is most radio codes are standard, no matter if you work in a theme park or anywhere else in the world.
- Now I need another attractions Cast Member for this to work, but I can signal most of these codes one handed without saying a word. I can look at someone from thirty yards away, make eye contact, and know what’s going on. This is one reason I prefer Disney’s codes to Universal’s. I can signal 103 on one hand. I can’t signal 87, which is their code for the same thing.
- The Cast Member part of our brain never turns off. I remember being at a special event at Typhoon Lagoon at the end of my college program (May 2013), and there was some sort of emergency in the wave pool. About six people who had been partying a moment before, dropped what they were doing, and came running to take up positions between the rest of us and the water, so no one could try to enter. In 2017, I was on the River Boat talking to the Cast Member in steam room, and a guest came up to him, and said that someone had fainted and needed help. He called up to the person in the wheelhouse, because they’re supposed to handle anything on the boat, due to the fact that the steam room can’t be unattended. For whatever reason the other person was refusing to come down “because we’re almost back”. (It’s a twenty-minute trip, and we had just passed the half way mark, we were not almost back.) Rather than let the Cast Member have to explain that he couldn’t leave his position to the guest, I headed in the direction she came from and yelled over my shoulder, “I got it.” I dialed 911 and stayed with the family until we reached the dock. The managers and stretcher team, we call it an Alpha, were waiting for us. I’m sure there were some fun questions to answer, about how a female voice made the call, when the two Cast Members on the boat were male, and I disappeared as soon as we docked.
- I never thought I would say that making a 911 call would be a calm experience, but I’ve now made enough of them that they don’t phase me. Nine times out of ten, it’s because a guest has collapsed of dehydration. However, their family doesn’t know that, and is usually freaking out, as you try to ask them the questions the operator is asking you. Working at Disney has made me great in a crisis.
- I touched on this briefly above about the crowd control, but if you have a large group of people you need to go somewhere, I’m your girl. I was working at a hotel late one night, when we had a fire alarm go off, and a Brazilian tour group of roughly 200 teenagers that only sort of spoke English, flooded both the lobby and the driveway. The managers were panicking trying to handle them and the other guests. I went up to one of the managers. “Where do you want them?” “What?” “I worked at Disney. Where do you want them?” “We have to clear the entrance so the firetrucks can get in.” It took me about ten minutes, but I got them all corralled off to the side. I spent the rest of the night out there, making sure they stayed put.
- You may have heard people talk about their customer service voice, well I have a Cast Member voice and it’s different from my customer service voice. There’s a lot more authority in the Cast Member voice, because I’m telling you what to do nicely, but I’m not asking. It works most of the time, regardless of where I am or if I’m working.This story was actually at Universal, but it’s related and too funny not to share. I was working at Skull Island: Regin of Kong, and we were supposed to have three people out front because the attraction was brand new, but for some reason, I was the only out there and I was SLAMMED. Jay happened to have come to see me at work, and wound up helping me height check kids… while wearing a Mickey Mouse tank top. None of the parents questioned it. Cast Member voice.
- I can spot a Disney manager a mile away. There is a specific dress code for business attire for the parks that is part of Disney Look. It is very distinctive and easy to spot. Woman dressed very nicely but wearing closed toed shoes that almost match, but not what you’d expect with that outfit? Man wearing a dress shirt, but no tie in 95-degree weather? Briefly in 2014, I worked at a dog grooming shop in Windermere, and I would always trip people up, because I would ask what they did for Disney based on how they were dressed.
- As mentioned previously, I have yet to find an ECV I can’t put into neutral to move. I can also maneuver multiple (empty) wheelchairs at a time, and stacks of strollers. This comes in handy when the bell stand is short staffed.
- I learned how to read military time working at Disney. Everything for guests is in normal am/pm times, but anything for cast only is in military time. (Drop 1 from the first number, and 2 from the second. 13:00=1:00 pm.)
- The “Disney Point” is pointing with two fingers instead of one, because it’s considered more polite. If you’ve never noticed Cast Members doing this, pay attention the next time you’re in the parks. You’ll see it everywhere! I will do this for the rest of my life. I had someone ask recently (well, recently when I started this article) if I was a flight attendant or military, because I point with two fingers. “Disney Cast Member.” He burst out laughing.
- Going to other theme parks drives me crazy because most aren’t as efficient as Disney. They dispatch vehicles with multiple empty seats, or I sit waiting to get off the ride longer, than it took to do the ride. I love Dollywood dearly, but I asked one of the guys at Firechaser Express how many people they carry an hour, and I just started laughing at his answer.
- This isn’t a skill I have, because I only worked on an attraction with a height requirement after I started at Universal, and I didn’t work it very long, but most attractions Cast Members can tell you how tall a kid is/if they’re tall enough just by looking.
- Were you a coordinator? Congratulations, in any other line of work, you were an assistant manager. I was never officially a coordinator, but I did get left in charge a couple of times.
- Public speaking is something I’ve always been fairly comfortable with, but I know so many people who were terrified on their first live trip around the Jungle with guests. Even if you never work somewhere like the Jungle Cruise, do enough safety spiels over a microphone, and public speaking will never be an issue again.
- Loading a vehicle is like playing Tetris with people. Personally, I think it’s the most fun thing in the world. This also makes me good at packing a suit case, fitting everything in my trunk, or loading a moving truck.
- Working at Disney means you have worked in virtually every element from blistering sun with a heat index of over 100, to torrential rain and howling wind, to freezing to the point your teeth chatter, and you didn’t know Florida could get so cold. I have come home drenched in more sweat after working outside, than I have some half marathons. I can also tell you I can get seven layers under a Jungle Cruise costume for warmth.
- You’ve been on your feet from the moment you clocked in to the moment you clocked out, except for your breaks, and that is no easy feat, let me tell you.
Last week I talked about Life After Disney, and the absolute hell I went through after I was forcibly separated from the company. It’s the same place many of you find yourself now. I said it before, and I’ll say it again, this is not about “I did and you can too!” But you will find a way through it. It takes as long as it takes, and you get to feel however you feel about it, and no one who hasn’t been through it gets to have an opinion.
That includes people who left voluntarily, because for a lot of them, taking cheap shots at people who still work at Disney on social media seems to be the only hobby they have. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. (To any of my former coworkers who are reading this, if I’m still friends with you on Facebook, I don’t mean you. If I deleted you, I do mean you. You’re the worst. Please take a good long look at why you feel the need to direct your anger at a company into insulting people who are supposed to be your friends.)
I’m repeating myself a little bit here from last week, but I wouldn’t be where I am today without leaving the Walt Disney Company. I wouldn’t have a house, our wedding would have been totally different, and Twenty Something in Orlando wouldn’t exist. What I didn’t say last week is that none of these things would be possible without my working at Disney. The skills I learned in two and a half years in the park led to the job that made these things possible. Now it took me a long time to figure that out, and that next year and a half was some of the darkest of my life. I struggled for a long time and made some bad decisions along the way, but I eventually got it figured out.
Again, this is not a pep talk. You have a long, hard road ahead of you. It’s going to be a long time before you get right with what happened. Even if you weren’t one of the laid off Cast Members, watching this happen to your friends isn’t easy. You’ve got a lot of rage, anger, and disappointment, and nowhere to put it. I was able to channel mine into these articles in the hopes I help somebody, anybody, get through this nightmare. Because at my heart, I’m still a Cast Member: wanting to help people and make magic never goes away.
