Friday, July 7, 2000
by Kevin Yee
Disneyland Guests are great. They pay admission and thus provide a livelihood
for all the people who work at Disneyland. In a way, they pay our salary.
And boy do they never let you forget it.
Not that all complaints are like that. But the more odious people insist
on arguing their case this way: they pay our salary so they deserve to
be treated as royalty. In theory, I even agree with that. But not when
it comes at the expense of the rights of other Guests.
We are taught that "every Guest is
a V.I.P." Some Guests even know this credo and try to throw it at me.
But listen carefully there. EVERY Guest is special. So if I give one Guest
preferential treatment, I'm not doing my job and treating EVERY Guest
equally well, am I?
Oh dear, I was on my soapbox again wasn't I? Stop me next time before
I do that.
On to the complaints, and let me warn you that these will be based around
my own experience, namely in restaurants. And I'll start off small.
We have this one guy, you see, at our restaurant. The Blue Bayou had
him for a while, and then basically got rid of him by dumping him into
the Cafˇ Orleans' staff (there is a rather hierarchical view of the restaurants,
it's all very snobby). Let's call him Jason. Jason was rude and abusive.
They should have just fired him, but he made good use of the unions and
always got his job back, even after multiple suspensions. So we got him.
For medical reasons, Jason couldn't raise his arms above his head. Don't
ask, because I don't know. I agree it sounds rather odd. Whenever he needed
something out of storage he'd come to us. We used to wonder how he ever
washed his hair if he couldn't raise his arms. Bend way over?
Jason was a never-ending source of
Guest complaints. He liked to do things his own way, even if
it was less efficient, so frequently he'd slow things down and that would
annoy the Guests. But mostly he was rude to Guests, usually the sort of
impatience with Guests we all feel but only he gives voice to. He was
even ruder to Cast Members, calling them "fat cows" and the like.
Guests wanted to hear that Jason would disciplined, and some even demanded
to me that we fire him. Sometimes I'd nod and indicate that indeed discipline
was pending for him, since that was what the Guest wanted to hear. Why
bother creating an argument when that would make her happy?
Jason wasn't the only source of complaints. It was a restaurant, so
we'd get hair in food very occasionally. Thai's just a simple refund and
profuse apology. One food item was really gross though. The Guest asked
me to come to his table, where he discreetly showed me his partly-eaten
ham & turkey croissant sandwich.
Inside was an inch-long green beetle,
hiding in the bed of lettuce very near the Guest's bite marks in the bread.
I think it was a June bug. The kicker was: it was still alive. Now, I've
sometimes suspected Guests would insert insects or hair on purpose to
get a free meal, but not this time. It was well-camouflaged by the lettuce.
That guy got all his food refunded. Not that they ate much after that,
and I don't really blame him.
Over at the French Market, they used to serve spaghetti, which you can
imagine the birds often misinterpreted for a plateful of worms. So as
soon as a table full of people would get up, they'd swarm the table and
tackle the pasta and fly away. Frequently they'd sit on the back of a
nearby chair and silently wait for a table to clear. Either activity involved
birds spending time on the seats or at the table, and nature being what
it is, birds will eventually leave droppings. Fresh ones. On the seats.
This grossed out some guy sufficiently
to corner me and demand that I kill all the birds. He was quite
angry and phrased it basically just like that: "Why the [bleep]
don't you just kill all the [bleeping] birds?" When I demurred,
he demanded that the park set traps. I told him Disneyland is a bird sanctuary,
which is true. He wasn't happy with that, either, but by spending a good
deal of time just talking with him and listening, he was eventually appeased.
Less mad, anyway. Sometimes the Guests just want to be heard.
Impudent berry trees at Cafe Orleans. These trees also
obscure the otherwise good view of Fantasmic from the Club 33.
The Cafˇ Orleans is shaded by large trees that unfortunately drop berries
at certain times in the year. They've been known to splat on food or heads.
One time a very irritated Guest demanded that I do something about the
person on the balcony above, who was throwing berries at her. And look,
it stained her shirt! Disneyland will have to pay for that as well, she
demanded. Of course I explained that it was the tree, not a person. But
the shirt was a problem.
The policy on such clothing problems is that we send them to First Aid,
where they have a laundry machine. If that doesn't do the trick, someone
else decides how and if the Guest is compensated. I cannot promise anything.
Of course, that's the last thing she wants to hear. She wants instant
gratification. It sounds to her like I'm just trying to make it somebody
else's problem, which is honestly not the truth.
While trying to explain that, I realized she didn't want to hear it.
She wanted to poke me and get me to promise we'd buy her a new shirt.
Yes, poke.
She kept grabbing my arm, flipping
me around, and poking me rather hard where she had been hit on the back
of the shoulder. back
of the shoulder.
"See! This is how hard it came down! Someone threw it at me!"
Well, Iím still doubtful. We do have Club 33ís main dining
room above us, and they do have a balcony, so anything is possible. I
can't say I was happy about what was basically assault, though. Eventually
she went off to First Aid and I went up to Club 33 to report the incident,
just in case she was right.
But the best "throwing food" story happened over at the French Market.
A woman was incensed that someone was throwing food at her from the second
floor balcony, and she brandished a rather large chicken leg. Too large,
in fact. It looked wrong somehow.
Storage area "the cage"
on the second floor above the French Market, to the right side.
I went out and looked at the scene of the crime. The area above the
French Market is just a big storeroom called "the cage" because many locations
in New Orleans Square have their own storage area defined by cages. No
one should be up there. I'm not even sure the windows up there open up.
It's actually sort of notorious for being one of those places amorous
CMs could go and be relatively safe from being discovered. Why should
they chuck an eaten leg at her?
She was adamant. But a further problem remained. We sold fried chicken
at the French Market, but this leg was just way too huge. Where did it
come from? Hmm, I thought. Maybe the Westside Diner, the employee cafeteria,
was serving giant chicken legs today. I went away to make a phone call
to find out, which proved to be a dead end.
As I came back to the Guest, another Guest seated at a nearby table
came up to me and told he had seen what happened. There had been no person
on the balcony. It had been a giant black crow carrying the bone, which
dropped it probably because it was too heavy. She just had the misfortune
to be underneath at the wrong moment.
And then I realized what this was.
A turkey leg. A smoked turkey leg. It must have come from the Big
Thunder area, where a cart sells them. The crow flew over the Market on
his way to his nest, and it just slipped at a bad moment. Amazing.
Some of the examples above are Guest overreactions, but there are an
equal number of examples of Guest idiocy. My favorite involves the Club
Dixie, a three inch square baked pastry. We'd call it a puff pastry. Inside
was small bits of ham and cheese, and the whole thing cost some ridiculous
amount. Worst of all, the name implied it was a Club Sandwich, so people
would order it and be annoyed with its size and price when they finally
saw it. We tried for years to get it removed or renamed, but some things
the Administration just insists on.
Sign for Club Dixie.
Anyway: the Club Dixie was small and certainly not enough for a meal.
One Guest saw fit to argue with me about Disneyland's pricing policy.
Only this time, instead of arguing that things are too expensive, he argued
that he got too little food. He liked the Club Dixie but just wanted it
to be bigger. He didnít mind the idea of having to pay twice as
much, he said, if he could just get twice as much more for it.
I had to blink at that one.
Why not just buy two of them, then? That's the same thing mathematically
as what he just suggested, a double portion at a doubled price. We couldn't
alter the portion size, since it's baked downstairs, and he only wanted
to argue the principle of it. But for the life of me, I couldn't get him
to see what I was talking about. I think maybe he figured out my point
pretty quickly and he was embarrassed that what he proposed was ludicrous,
but rather than back down, he kept insisting on it. Finally I had to agree
with him that DL is foolish for this policy, which is all it took to get
him happy.
Dealing with the complaints is an art.
As the old saying goes, when some
people come to Disneyland, they leave their brains at the Main Gate.
Now then, you Cast Members out there: email me with more. I don't want
the stories to just "rain" over me. Let the "dumb Guest" stories positively gush into my mailbox. Let them cascade my way.
Inquiring readers want to know.
Next up: Disneyland Anniversaries
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Are you a CM or a former CM? I would love to hear and share your stories! E-mail me! Stories and comments you submit become property of and may be published on this site; we normally don't publish last names of current CMs, but if you wish to remain anonymous altogether or do not want me to share your stories, please let me know when you e-mail me. — Shoshana NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in reader-contributed stories do not reflect those of Cast Place or MousePlanet. CM – Cast member; company lingo for “employee.” Empowerment Evolution – The 1995 attempt by newer park management to introduce modern accountability and market forces into the stodgy Disneyland methodology and power hierarchies. The name was meant to “empower” rank and file employees by removing layers of their management, though now there are more managers than ever. TPO – Theme Park Operations; the division of the Disneyland hierarchy that actually works in the theme park itself. TDA – Team Disney Anaheim; the name of the on-site administration building. Area manager – used to be responsible for an entire land, with all business divisions in the area reporting to him. Area supervisor – the immediate boss for location supervisors who divide up a department of intelligently grouped locations. The area supervisors in turn reported to the area manager. Nowadays all supervisors and area supervisors have been replaced by managers and assistant managers — the same idea, but smaller “business units" than a department; usually just one location in fact. RFT – “A” status; a full-time hourly employee. RPT – “B” status; an hourly employee five days a week but just not quite 40 hours usually. CR – “C” status; an hourly employee who works weekends year-round and five days a week during all school holiday periods (including summer and Christmas break). CT – a part-time hourly employee who works five days a week during all school holiday periods (including summer and Christmas break). No seniority, so shifts worked are usually quite short. Locate the employment center to fill out an application, and they will call you for an interview (dress nicely, just shy of an actual suit). Once there, follow these rules, in this order of importance: 1. Smile and be very friendly. They want outgoing people.
2. Do not let the group interview throw you off balance. They want outgoing people who can “perform” a little bit.
3. Do not worry about job (in)experience. They don't care. They want friendly people, not experienced and/or hardened people.
4. Do your best to convince them you already have a Disney attitude: you want to work with people, you're a team player, and you would consider this a dream job (however, don't overdo it on the crazy-Disney-fan side either). Strike a nice balance.
5. Did I mention the importance of a smile? 
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