I’ve been employed at the Disneyland Resort for a few months now, and I’d like to share some of my experiences.

Disneyland would be my fourth job, the first three being bussing tables, dish-washing, and cooking/serving pizza, in that order.  I applied into the Attractions department.  Attractions Cast Members, in the most basic of descriptions, are ride operators.  You will never catch me using that term to describe myself, because to me a ride operator simply operates the ride.  Operating the ride is only the beginning of the responsibilities of an Attractions Cast Member.

Disneyland wants friendly people to work for them inside the park.  It might take a sizable resume to land an office position at the resort, but any high school graduate with a smile likely can make it into an in-park position.  Virtually everything you might need to know on the job, right down to how to be perfectly polite to the park “guests”, is taught to you on the clock.  The training I received at the resort was, at that time, the most fun I’d ever had at a job.

I wanted to work at Disneyland because everyone seemed to love it there, right down to the employees.  In all honesty, not a single day have I actually felt like I was at work.  Even though the “backstage” areas look no different from any other business,  they still carry some of the ambiance you feel inside the park.  No matter where you are in the resort, it feels great.

When I wake up in the morning I don’t dread my shift, I anxiously await it.  When I clock off from a shift I don’t heave a sigh of relief, I just think about what to do on my next scheduled shift.  This feeling towards work was an absolute shock to me, after my previous jobs.

The difference between working a job you could care less about, and a job which you immensely enjoy is absolutely enormous, but I don’t need to tell you that.  What I want to say is that if you work an unskilled job for too long, it can affect how you perceive the rest of the working world.  Your co-workers slowly but surely change from odd to acceptable.  Even the dirt-poor job you work begins to seem alright.

I lost sight of what to do with my life and while I don’t place all of the blame on my minimum-wage job choices, I certainly attribute a sizable amount to them.  By working at those jobs I believe I did much more harm to myself than what the money could have made up for.  My wake-up call was when I had acclimated to whiny high-schoolers with no future plans beyond “going to college”, even though they had no clue what they would major in, or what career they would ultimately enter.

I don’t expect them to have their entire life planned out.  However, their lack of ambition was as contagious as the common cold.  The more I heard about others simply slipping through their lives disposing of their little incomes as soon as they got it, the more “normal” it seemed.

If you don’t like the direction your career is headed, find your Disneyland.  I found mine, and I couldn’t be happier.