Chapter 11: Part 3. Jenette - A Tribute.

I recently read "And Then There Were None" by Agatha Christie. Relax, I did it as research because I want to write a murder mystery. As the characters are killed off one by one, I couldn't help but feel a parallel between that novel and my Rescue Ranger experience. Now, we clearly weren't a bunch of strangers mysteriously invited to an island where were are ultimately punished for sins committed, so to speak. We were, however, a group of unsuspecting travelers watching each other drop like flies, one by one, and living with an extreme paranoia that we may be next. Also, like the characters in the book, none of us were that innocent.

40 Rescue Rangers came down to Orlando at the same time as me. While some of them were only signed up to stay until May, a majority of us were in the "Spring Advantage" program, which ended in August. "Spring Advantage" is a little bit misleading, as there was little benefit to staying that extra three months. I think a more accurate term would have been the "Spring, Then-Get-Taken-Advantage-Of" program. Disney is smooth like that. Spin something a little bit, give it a positive-sounding name, and there you go. People will eat it up. They could probably get all of their cast members to contract the AIDS virus if they called it "Enchantment Sharing."

Anyway, most of us were Spring Advantage. Yet, of the 40 people I went to Orlando with, I'd say I graduated with less than a dozen. Not an exaggeration. It was hard to stay employed there. It's not like a normal job where you just show up, work, don't fuck up or act like an idiot, and go home. You had to put such an extreme amount of effort into not getting fired that you were constantly living in a state of fear that something you were doing was against the rules and you were unknowingly signing your own termination letter, licking the envelope, and sending it to HR. Because of this, a Disney cast member can never truly "give 100%." They can only give 50%, because the other half goes to actively and vigilantly browsing in your head through the thousands of pages worth or employee manuals to make sure you aren't inadvertently breaking some obscure rule like counting back change the wrong way or forgetting to point with two fingers instead of one and will therefore be packing for home by the end of the week. That pointing with two fingers thing, by the way? It's real. It's called the "Disney Point." Pointing with one finger can look like you are pointing at some one. Now, one can logically come to the conclusion that the mere addition of another finger to this gesture will help to ensure that someone doesn't think that they are being pointed at, therefore giving them a moment of confusion, therefore ruining their. Entire. Freaking. Vacation.

Jenette was the first victim in all of this. Not because of the pointing. She was good with the Disney point. Most likely because any time she wasn't on stage (working in a place where you are visible to "guests" of the park) she had a cigarette in her hand, so her index and middle finger were in, in a sense, already conditioned to the Disney Point. Poor Jenette didn't understand CDS.

CDS - The Cast Deployment System. It's actually pretty neat. Before every shift you clock in on a computer and it prints up a little receipt and tells you what your duty is. Say I am working at Mouse Gear, a gift shop. I clock in, and the paper says "Take over register 2 from Sheila. Shelia clocks out for the day." So I go over to register 2 and give Sheila the best news since finding out that mole was not malignant. Sometimes CDS would give you completely senseless and ultimately frustrating things to do. For instance, you could be told to play at the Build-A-Mr-Potato-Head station for fifteen minutes, then check back in with CDS. After coming back, CDS could tell you to go "Make Magical Moments" for another fifteen and come back. Then maybe "Organize bobbleheads" for fifteen minutes. This great big cycle of "fuck-me-why-did-I-come-in-to-work-today" was referred to ask "tasking." Essentially, there are more than enough employees working right now and they just don't have anything for you to do at the moment. The main thing I will always remember about CDS is how whenever I would see a person walking towards, or even just near, me with a piece of receipt paper, I would pray to God that it was either my lunch break, my fifteen minute break, or time for me to clock out. To this day, I still have some sort of weird complex about receipt paper. Now you know why.

Another nice thing about CDS was that if you wanted to go home early, you needn't ask a manager (they were nearly impossible to track down anyway). You could just log in and request an ER (Early Release). Remember about seven tangents ago when I mentioned Jenette? This is where she comes in. You see training/orientation at Disney World is a lot of information for someone to handle. And that's just someone with a normal position, at say...a gift shop or a ride or something. For us Rangers, it was 3-4 times worse. We had to attend eight-hour training sessions in every line of business, then complete on-the-job training at locations all over the park. It took not less than a month to "earn our ears" and finally be considered a full fledged Rescue Ranger. For other people, it took less than a week before they could remove the "Earning My Ears!" badge from their name tag. But not us Rangers. We got to be treated like newbies for weeks. Which, incidentally, wasn't so bad because it was a catch-all excuse for getting out of anything. "Sorry, I don't know how to do that," was the motto of our squad. Clean up puke? Sorry. I'm a Rescue Ranger, I've never done it before. Stay late to close the store and organize the stock room? Would if I could, but I'm just a Rescue Ranger, oh I simply wouldn't know where to begin!

So yeah, a lot of information. Hard to handle. Nobody suffered from that worse than Jenette. On her first day of work at a merch location (merch is "merchandise." Ergo, a merch location is a store), Jenette wasn't feeling well (Note: I don't know how Jenette was feeling that afternoon, but my story packs more of an emotional punch if I say she was under the weather) and logged into CDS to leave a little bit early. For all of the intense training and immersions into every possible scenario that could possibly happen on the job (we spent about an hour learning ergonomic exercises during custodial training), we were never really taught how to use CDS. Jenette thought that requesting to leave early meant you could leave early. Dumb thing to think? Yes. But grounds for termination on a brand new employee who hasn't even finished unpacking her bags yet? Really? I know some Disney freak somewhere is reading this right now and is saying "She broke the rule! It's that simple! The rules are there for a reason! She had to leave!" To any person like that, I'd like to say this:

You pin-collecting, embroidered Mouse Ear wearing loser. Did working for Disney take away your ability to show normal human compassion and recognize that not everything is that simple and innocent people who make simple mistakes deserve a second chance, or have you always had a stick up your ass?

Leaving work, or not showing up to work, without notifying your boss is heavy stuff. I'll admit it. But firing a brand new employee for not feeling well and misunderstanding a somewhat complex computer system that you never bothered to train her on to begin with? After Jenette left, I thought of her often. Mostly on the shitty days when I was cleaning ash trays or standing in the blistering sun trying to sell squeeze-breezes or getting written up for wearing black shoes with khaki shorts. I would wonder to myself if maybe messing up and getting fired was a blessing in disguise for her. She didn't have to suffer through this. Like one of those old snapping mouse-traps. Jenette's neck got crushed and she died before she knew what happened. The rest of us were stuck in the glue motels just waiting for death. I remember taking a walk with her on one of our first days. She told me how she was really exciting for this opportunity, and really scared that she would do something stupid and get fired. Self-fulfilling prophecy, or bureaucratic bullshit?

Sorry, Jenette. I still think about you from time to time.

Honestly. I talk a lot of shit about Disney. But it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me. It changed my life. That's for sure. It made my resume look amazing, which helped me get jobs. It introduced me to friends from all over the country whom I still keep in touch with today. It gives me a permanent excuse for openly admitting that I love Disney Parks ("What? I used to work here!") There were good moments, but as it so often goes with life, those aren't always the most interesting points of discussion. Lest I seem like a Disney-hating, bitter CP alumni, I will leave you with some of my favorite memories.

Days when they had nowhere to deploy us, so they sent us out to the park to play with kids, armed with Mickey stickers, bubbles, Magical Moment certificates, and a jump rope for "Chip N' Dale's Jump Rope Challenge."

Meeting a guy who had just come back from Iraq and his girlfriend. They were having a hard time getting around because he had injured his leg overseas, and they barely had enough money to afford admission, let alone a wheelchair. I ran to the front, explained the situation, and came back with a complimentary one for them

Stories from other Rangers...

Dustin:
Opening the wrong door and accidentally causing an attraction to get shut down for an hour.

Emily A:
The times we LEFT property to eat DURING our shift and Deployment Managers walked in.

Emily R:
Hooking up in the showers at Mickey's Retreat.

Twigger:
Ingesting chemicals on purpose so that I could get sick. Hospital is still better than Custodial work.