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Tales From The College Program: Getting Fired. Part 2

Getting my job back: Since Rat Face had gone as high as possible to get me fired, I decided to do the same when trying to get my job back.   Ed Backlor was the VP of Downtown Disney at the time, I decided to email him.   A day later I received an email from Djuan Rivers (who I just discovered is a Disney big shot now ).   Ed was out of town and had forwarded my email to Djuan.   We arranged a time for him to call me the next day.   I was pretty nervous as a sat there staring at my phone waiting for him to call.   I didn’t know where the conversation would go.   Djuan was very friendly, he had read my email and asked me some more questions about the firing.   I left out the part about how everyone eating for free so I wouldn’t get anyone else fired.   He told me the typical “well, I know it’s not a lot of money, but if everyone gave away $3.25 worth of food, it would really hurt the company.”   He said I could reapply with Disney in ...
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Tales From The College Program: Getting Fired. Part 1

All of my College Program posts up to this point have been in no sort of order, until now.  Today's post is written 10 years to the day, the day I was fired. When you're a CP, working less than 40 hours a week is pretty much unheard of, but when you're a part time Cast Member, 40 hours a month is a miracle.  My program ended in January 2004, instead of going home I found an apartment a few miles away from Downtown Disney with my coworker Dan and his roommate, Rickli.  During the next program Dan and I worked a couple days a week.  It was almost no different than when we were CP's.  When that program ended in the summer our hours dropped drastically.  We were only working one or two days a month.  Instead of getting second jobs, we started doing medical experiments for money.  We'd spend a weekend at a facility in Gainesville and make a quick $1,000.  This is how we were able to afford our apartment. My birthday (September 18th) came and I...

Look What You Did You Little Jerk: The Macaulay Culkin Incident

Last night I saw Macaulay Culkin's band "The Pizza Underground" at the Hi Ho Lounge in New Orleans.  If you aren't familiar with them, they sing Velvet Underground songs, but change the lyrics to be about pizza.  You can listen to their demo here. Like everyone else on the planet, I love Home Alone.  I saw it in the theater when I was 8 and have been a fan of Macaulay Culkin ever since. I live in Houston, so New Orleans is a 6 hour drive, but this was not something I was going to miss. The Show: The Pizza Underground demo is 9 minutes long.  If they would have come out, handed out pizza and played for 15 minutes I really think the crowd would have been satisfied.  Instead they would leave the stage between songs and have someone else come out.  First it was one of the members from Carte Blanche (one of their opening acts) who came out and rapped.  Macaulay's girlfriend came out and sang a poem that he had written for her.  One of the female ...

Tales From The College Program: Guinea Pigs and Sorority Girls

You may find this hard to believe, but being a Disney Intern does not pay very well.  It was because of this, that Dan and I decided to find ways to some make extra money.  The easiest way we found was to sell our plasma.  There were a few draw backs to this though. 1. It only paid $15. 2. We had to pay $5 in tolls to get there. 3. It was 40 minutes away. 4. We had to sit in a waiting room with mostly homeless people for an hour. 5. Plus another hour in the chair with a needle the size of a Capri Sun straw in your arm 6. Dan took one of the plasma girls out on a date and never called her again. 7. The one time Dan's roommate Rickli came with us, he got violently ill in the CiCi's pizza bathroom afterwards. 8. One time they jammed the needle through my vein which gave me a hematoma that went from my shoulder to my wrist. Eventually we found something much easier that not only paid more, but also fed us.  We became professional guinn...

Tales From The College Program: Smush and The Pretty One

I received a special request to write out this story, so here it is. I was in my apartment at Vista Way when Dan called me "Some random girls just called my apartment and asked if I wanted to go to Tampa."  At Vista Way calling an apartment was simple, you added a one to the first number of the apartment (1205 = ext 2205) Dan started telling me about these girls he was talking to and their plan to go to Tampa.  In the middle of our conversation I heard the click of another call coming in, I told Dan to hold on and switched over.    On he line was a very Puerto Rican sounding girl "Hey, so jew wanna go to Tampa with sum sexy girls?"  I told her to hold on and switched back over to Dan "Now they are calling me!" I told him.  I switched back over to mystery girl and told her that one of her friends was on the phone with my friend, she told me that we should all meet up at their apartment.  I walked over to Dan's and the three of us (Me, Dan, and his r...

Honey, I Shrunk The Kids

I remember being up early on a Saturday morning watching cartoons and seeing a trailer for a movie with Seymour from Little Shop of Horrors.  I ran upstairs and woke my mom up.  I told her there was this great movie coming out called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and asked if we could see it.  Without any hesitation she said no. I was really confused by her answer, until a few days later when I saw the trailer again and pointed it out to her.  Turns out she thought I had said Honey, I Shot the Kids. After the movie was released my Saturday morning cartoons were interrupted by short segments about Disney's newest theme park, MGM Studios.  One of these segments showed the backlot tour and how the "bee scene" from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids was done. In 1991 my family visited MGM Studios and while on the backlot tour my sister and I were picked to ride the bee from the film to show the rest of the tour how the effect was done.  A Cast Member came up and asked...

Tales from The College Program: 10 Years Later

Wow, This week 10 years ago my friend Ralf and I were loading up his tiny car and heading off to Orlando for our jobs in the Walt Disney World College Program. It really does not seem that long ago but since I was 20 at the time and 30 now...I guess it was. I've decided that todays post will mostly just be pictures from the year and a half I lived in Florida working for Disney.  Let's see what has changed. First of all, I don't think I could get away with this hair at 30.  This is also the shirt I wore when trying to meet Hilary Duff. I was also a big fan of wearing my Thriller jacket everywhere. but as you can see, it no longer fits Back then I would collect Fast Passes off the benches in the locker room.  Waiting in line was for the tourists.  Unfortunately, you cant even use an hour old Fast Pass now, forget about one that's been expired for a year. My workplace, The Missing Link Sausage Company has been torn down. Here...