Earned My Ears!

So the last time I posted was two weeks ago and I was still in training but now I am all done, I passed my assessment and I am officially a miner in the seven dwarf's mine! I am going to give short summaries of the past two weeks for each day, hopefully I remember what I did. *Warning: this will be a very long post*

Friday June 13th was my final day of training. We actually went down for a while because of weather so we didn't get to do much. We mostly reviewed some stuff that was going to be on the assessment. I felt pretty confident that I could do all the positions on my own and good thing I did because we really didn't get to do a lot this day.

Saturday June 14th was my assessment! It was a 147 question test and then the rest of the time we went through all the positions and we assessed on how well we did them. It went really well because I passed! We had to rush through some of the positions though because we went down for weather again today (we do almost every day) so our assessment time was cut a little short. But it all worked out in the end. Later that night some of the people in my Fantasyland training group and I decided to go to Magic Kingdom to celebrate earning our ears! We finally felt official, it was awesome.

Sunday June 15th was my first day on my own. I was so incredibly nervous, I don't know why I was, I knew how to do everything but I still was worried I mess something up. But it went extremely well! The ride was down for weather by the time I got there so I didn't really do anything for the first 2 hours but after we started operating again it was liked I had worked there for months. I did all the positions correctly and there weren't any issues. I was there from 6:15 pm to 2:45 am so that was interesting, by the end of the night I was so tired.

Monday June 16th my second day on my own. It was pretty similar to my first day, I learned this day that I am the first brand new CP to work at the Mine Train! So that was pretty awesome. Everyone was surprised to hear that I was brand new and that I had never worked at another attraction before. I guess I was doing a pretty good job! One thing that stood out about this day was that a woman came up to me when I was at greeter and told me that her husband was in line and that people kept cutting him and those around him in line and he thought that a fight was going to break out. I didn't really know what to do so I told one of the managers who had just come down by chance and relayed the story to him and then he proceeded to call security. I don't know what happened with the people who were cutting in line but later that night one of the other managers came up to me and asked if I had called security earlier and I told her that I didn't and that I only told the other manager. She basically ignored that fact and acted as if I called security and proceeded to tell me that I shouldn't have done that and to go and check out the claim myself next time. I apologized and just brushed it off, I'm not about to make enemies with the mangers on my second day. But overall it was a pretty good day.

Tuesday June 17th I had the day off so I decided to go to Epcot with my friend Darius who works at the Little Mermaid ride and one of his friends. We only went on a couple of rides, we walked through the countries though and met a ton of characters. After that we met up with my friend Ash, who I met by the Patterson pool, and went to Animal Kingdom. After that Ash went to meet up with some of his friends for dinner so we decided to go to Magic Kingdom and visit Elaina, the girl I was in training with, it was her first day on her own.

Love hanging out with our boss!

Wednesday June 18th my roommate Cate and I had the day off so we decided to spend in in Animal Kingdom! The goal of the day was to mainly look at the animals but it was her first time there so we ended up doing almost everything! We rode Everest twice, saw the Festival of the Lion King where Cate discovered her dream job of being the bird woman who flies around the stage, saw a bunch of animals, and caught four dinosaurs. Overall it was a pretty productive day! I really love Animal Kingdom, it doesn't get enough credit.

Photos we took during our dinosaur capturing experience.

Thursday June 19th I worked 3:45 pm to 2:15 am it was a nice 10 hour day... bleh. We had to evacuate the ride because some lady threw her purse on to one of the intrusion mats in the ride. I had to evac on my own (with no trainer) with a guy who had never evacuated on his own before either so that was an experience. It took us a little longer than it should have but we did it. Some woman was recording me the whole time so that was uncomfortable and weird. After we evaced everyone we reset and we back up and running not too long after. The rest of the day was pretty boring and uneventful compared to that. 

Friday June 20th we were down for weather by the time I got there, so again for the first two hours or so I just basically sat around and did nothing. Which is honestly great, I love when we go down for weather except that the guests are horrible and ask dumb questions. "When will the weather pass" how am I supposed to know? "Have you heard anything about when you'll reopen?" As soon as the weather passes. The only information I get about the weather is what I can see on my phone, the same as anyone else. I was there from 4:45 pm-12:15 am, not bad, after we came back from the weather downtime it was a normal, routine day. 

Saturday June 21st I worked 5 pm-12:15 am was a normal day at work, no down times that I can remember. The only thing I did this day was get a new bag from the outlet mall before work, so that was cool. Its a plain black Vera Bradley and it only cost me $45 which is awesome, I am super excited to use it!

Sunday June 22nd was my 15 hour shift. I worked 12:30 pm-3:45 am. Why? I have no idea. We weren't understaffed, I don't know why I was there that long. The first 8 hours weren't too bad but right around 10 pm I got tower for the first time, which is the position where you need to be constantly watching the monitors, I got super tired and almost fell asleep in there! The only reason I didn't is because a manager came into the room with me and was watching the monitors because the fireworks were going on and a lot of the smoke was blowing into the ride so he had to come check it out which kept me awake. It was a really long day and all I wanted to do was go to sleep.

Monday June 23rd I slept in until like 1 pm, which is so weird for me because I never sleep in past like 11 am. I didn't work until 4:45 pm this day so it was okay. This day was actually the best day I have had so far because we were down literally all day except for 1 1/2 hours at the end of the night. Apparently there was a fire in the ride control room early that morning so the morning people never officially opened the ride. So whatever the problem was it took all day to fix and by the time we were given the all clear to open we still had to go through the opening procedures to make sure everything was okay. For some reason someone thought it would be a good idea to do it during the fireworks so all the smoke blew into the ride and caused the fire alarm to go off about 20 mins into us opening, so we had to start all over again after the fire department came and gave us the all clear. Basically before all this we just stood outside the Mine Train and told people we were down for technical difficulties and we weren't sure if or when we would open back up for the day. People were getting so angry that they had booked fast passes and wouldn't be able to use them and that they had driven half-way across the country just to go on this ride. We opened at 11:50 pm and we were clear of guests by 1:20 am. It was a pretty good day, especially after coming off of that 15 hour day the day before.

Tuesday June 24th was my roommate Hannah's 19th birthday. She ended up sleeping in until like 2 pm so Celine, Cate, and I went to the pool for a little, then went to Magic Kingdom and then met up with her at Hollywood Studios. We all got semi-dressed up and took a ton of pictures, watched Festival of Fantasy, went on a few random rides at Magic Kingdom. It was really fun, we didn't go on any exciting rides or anything, it was just fun to be dressed nice and taking a ton of pictures. When we finally met up with Hannah at Studios we rode a couple rides and then met up with our other roommate Ashleigh for dinner at the Sci-Fi Dine-In Theatre. It was really cool, it is themed like a 50's drive-in theatre and they play really bad sci-fi clips of movies on the screen. After dinner Ashleigh and Hannah went home because they were tired but Celine, Cate and I went back to Magic Kingdom to squeeze in some more rides.

Wednesday June 25th was another day off for me! I didn't do much in the morning, just hung around the apartment, went down to the pool for a bit with Cate. I didn't want to waste the day though so I asked her if she wanted to do something and we decided we'd go to Universal Studios and get our annual passes, we'd been talking about getting them so we decided to just go. Cate's friend Jeremy came with us which was great because he is really nice and he knew where everything was since I had only been to Islands of Adventure before and Cate had never been to either of the parks. It was really fun, Universal is better for more intense rides but their show is so bad. Cate and I were pointing out all the things that Disney would never do. It was fun though, it was cool to experience things like a real guest since we had never been there before.

Thursday June 26th was another morning-afternoon pool day. Charlotte, Celine, and I went to Chik-fil-A for lunch, did a little grocery shopping, and then sat by the pool for a little. I worked from 3:45 pm- 2:15 am, it was another routine day. We went down for like two hours for weather and during that time we had a maintenance issue, it got fixed during the down time but the track had to be reset after we came back from weather before we could let guests on. The rest of the day was uneventful. I was so tired when I came home.

So that was everyday for the past two weeks, I'm sure I forgot some stuff but oh well! I'll try to update more often! That's all for now!

Settling In

Thursday June 5th-Thursday June 12th

To sum up this past week in one word: TRAINING!

Finally I've been able to start my training after everyone had almost finished with theirs I had finally started mine.

Thursday June 5th I finally got to go somewhere other than Disney University for training and this place was... Magic Kingdom! My class this day was called Once Upon a Time... Is Now! It started off with a 4 hour in-depth tour of Magic Kingdom which was really cool but really tiring. It was a lot of stuff I already knew, but there were some new things that I learned. We also got to ride the Haunted Mansion and skip the line, so that was pretty cool as well. After our tour we got broken up into groups in regards to our role and our location. I was in a group of nine people who would all be working Fantasyland attractions! From there we went back out into the park and walked around Fantasyland a little more and talked about certain attractions there. Then we went to lunch and then came the highlight of my day (and you know it's good because I got paid to walk around Magic Kingdom already) I got my costume!!

Friday June 6th was another training day but it was still group training, not on the job so I didn't get to wear my costume this day. This training day was called For Our Guests and I don't know why it was called that because all we did that day was ride almost every ride in Fantasyland. It was an absolutely amazing day of training, if you could call it that. Along with riding rides we got to see all of our backstage areas we would be going to, we didn't see much of Mine Train because it was so busy. But we saw everyone else's areas and got to go a little more in-depth in some of the positions of the attractions. It was a really fun training day, who gets to say that they were being paid to go on rides all day??

Saturday June 7th was my first day of on the job training! In my training group of nine there was one other girl who was also going to be working the Seven Dwarves Mine Train and she had the exact same schedule as me! So I didn't feel all awkward and alone my first day since I got to do everything with her. Our shift started at 6:45 am, that was quite the change for me. We met our trainer who is AMAZING he is the greatest guy I've met at Disney, he should be much higher up in the company. He just has such a fun personality and he is great at his job, so many people love him and I am so grateful to have him as a trainer. Such a great guy, he made us feel so comfortable on our first day. We started out with a track walk, at Mine Train everyone gets a separate area to open in the morning so things get done faster, we picked up walking and resetting the track, it is very tiring. Obviously you have to walk the entire track which is quite the workout. Also at Mine Train you can't cross the track in the station, you have to climb a flight of stairs, cross over from above, then walk down a flight of stairs. That alone is a workout, and we have to do that many times a day. I was not prepared for all this physical activity and I came home that day extremely tired. We also got to experience an Evac (on our first day! Unheard of!) so we had to go back out onto the track and get guests off a train. This involves things called lock and leveling devices, since the Mine Train's cars rock back and forth it would be dangerous if a guest were to get out while it was rocking. With the lock and leveling devices it locks the cars in place so that they can't rock. Day one of training was just to get our feet wet, we mostly observed our trainer and got a feel for what we'd be doing in the next few days. It is very fast paced, but I think I'm really going to like it.

Sunday June 8th was another 6:45 am shift, everyone complains about closing, but I'd much rather go to bed at 3:00 am and sleep in than wake up early. This day we opened tower, which is like the control room of the ride. There are a lot of rules to follow here and you have to have your eyes glued to the screen. A lot of things have been going wrong on the Mine Train so tower position scares me the most, I feel like I'd panic in a situation where the ride has to be stopped or something like that. I'm sure I'll become more comfortable with it in time, but for now it still scares me. After we opened tower we got a little more involved in some of the other positions. We got to load guests into trains, "please pull up on your lap bar" and unload them out of trains, "please exit to your right--ma'am your right, right, thank you". Guests sometimes don't listen or have a hard time understanding, I don't know what it is but you'd think I was speaking a different language when I say some of these things to them.

Monday June 9th yet another 6:45 am shift (the last one) this was our hump day of training.We opened tower again this day, I am starting to get a little more comfortable with it. We also got to go through many more positions this day. We did station assist: the person who tells people which rows to sit in, grouper: the person who sends about 20 people to station assist, and merge: the person who merges the standby and fastpass lines together. These positions are very fast paced and you need to be very attentive, these are major areas where guests either don't understand what you are saying or they completely ignore you. It is easy to mess up in these areas, but you have to just let it go and move on. After this day I felt really confident about working in the mine. It is a fun, fast paced work environment and that's what I do well in.

Tuesday June 10th I worked from 6:30 pm to 3:00 am and I guess these hours are something I'm going to need to get used to because full time cast members joke that CP (college program) actually standsfor "closing person" because all cps get the closing shifts, but I am so okay with that, I don't like opening or waking up early. Today was our fourth day of training, we did more of the fast-paced positions again and we got to do tower during the day while the ride was running with guests on it. The park closed at 1:00 am, so for the last two hours we were supposed to mess around with the lock and leveling devices and practice evacing the ride. However we had to actually evac guests at about 11:30 for a real issue so we got out of doing it later. We were supposed to leave early since we no longer would be practicing evacs but we had to stay since there were still trains on the track. We were supposed to store them once maintenance was finished but they took too long so we left at our scheduled time.

Wednesday June 11th was my first official day off! I slept in until 1:00 pm, I never do this. I was so tired from the previous night, I probably could have slept longer. Today was my productive day, I went grocery shopping at Publix for the first time and I did all of my laundry. When some of roommates got home we even went to the outlet mall and Target. I found a Disney look watch but I am still on the hunt for Disney look sunglasses. It was a boring day but I got a lot done.

Thursday June 12th I woke up really early, at like 8:00 am and I don't even know why. I lounged around the house for a bit, took my roommate Charlotte to pick up her car, went down by the pool for 30 mins (left early because a ton of internationals were smoking-gross), went do Downtown Disney and bought anything Mine Train related I could find. After that Celine came home and we decided to randomly go to Magic Kingdom JUST BECAUSE WE CAN, we did like all of the boring or over-looked attractions there. Then we came home and had a roommate meeting because we needed to figure out a cleaning schedule, we'd been putting it off for a while now and it was seriously time to change things. Everything went well and we have a bunch of stuff in order now which is great!

Tomorrow is my last day of training, I am so excited but also pretty nervous. After tomorrow is my assessment and then I am on my own! It is still all so surreal to me and I don't know that it will ever hit me that I am living and working in Disney World, it is just crazy!