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Last week in Disney!  I have three days work and two days off to pack. I say goodbye to everybody and everything, it is sad to mention leaving, but we have to face.

Disney is a great company to work for. Learning is not only from two classes, but also from the job we work on, the people we meet and the experience we get. I learn how to satisfy guests, how to improve peostill kills, how to make time management, etc. living reaches me how to live by my own without parents’ care. We learn cooking, we learn understanding, we learn different cultures of different countries. The most surprised part for me is people make friends everywhere: bus, apartment, park, supermarket, hotel, and so on. That is Disney’s magic to make these unbelievable moments happen anytime and anywhere.

I love Disney! I am so thankful and happy that it creates amazing memories in my life!

I got my feedback from our manager yesterday, one of her comment about me is to think over during working. This is my first job to work in a hotel for four months, I believe I should get more experience in this industry to think over. It is not a easy job.

My story here is while I was doing turn-down service one day, I knock a guest’s door. When the door is opened, I see an old lady and her son with their panic faces. What happen? I ask them whether they need my turn-down service or not politely, and the lady says they don’t this service and her son lost his wallet. That’s why they look unhappy. I tell them they can punch the phone in their room to call Lost and Found, if the gentleman lost his wallet in our parks or resort, we might can find it for him. My words must remind him something, he goes to our concierge to ask immediately. Couple minutes later when I meet them again in the hallway, I ask, is everything good? The old lady comes to me and seizes my excitedly,  saying they find the wallet! I am happy to hear this good news, my help might be Insignificant, but I am glad to see a smile on every guest’s face.

My manager’s story is she is in park one day and she sees a little girl is crying so badly. She takes out her mickey stickers and speaks loudly: excuse me, I need somebody help me to give these mickey stickers to the smiling people! The little girl hears it and rises her hand with her tears. My manager walks to her and asks her, you sure you can do this? The little girl nods her head strongly. My manager says, I give you a hint about how to find  people who is smiling: when you smile to them first they will smile back! And then the little girl wipes her tear immediately and blossoms a beautiful smiling flower on her face.

This week I finish my two Disney classes. I take final test for Human Resource Management and give a perfect ending with my group presentation for Experiential Learning, I am happy to hear that my instructor love my Build-A-Bear story as our introduction of presentation.

Our CPs don’t like to go to Villas to help clean rooms for an hour and half, and I don’t know some of housekeepers don’t like us either. One day three of us are in the Villas office waiting for manager to give us the assignment, she calls a housekeeper who already in a room to start to clean and asks her if she needs any help. The housekeeper says of course I need help but not College Program! All of us feel a kind of embarrassed after hearing this, the manager says that is all I have right now! I think the reason they don’t like us to help is we are the new. Even though we work here almost four months, we are still not familiar every step and detail of cleaning Villas rooms. Sometimes after we dust or vacuum, the housekeepers will do these again, they don’t trust our work performance and it makes me frustrated to help them.

Housekeeping looks like a job to do, but I am still learning how to finish a room quick, clean and has a perfect looking.

It is a leaving season! Yesterday morning I have the last breakfast with one of my roommates Myra who is leaving after breakfast, she gets self-terminated because she has health issue. We take pictures with her, we hug her, we talk about next meet in Disneyland and we say goodbye with our smile, we believe we have the chance to see each other in the future!

Last night we have a retire party for a full-time employee who is work in Yacht&Beach Resort more than 15 years. Our CPs buy chicken, other people cook food for this party, and all of us have a very wonderful time but we should say goodbye again. Next week my coworker Yiki is leaving, she is the housekeeping CP who leaves us first, and then the other one, and then it is my turn! I feel so sad and helpless about our separation,  could we not say goodbye and get together forever?

One day night our manager got Kitchen Sink for us! It is the most famous ice cream in Beach&Cream of our resort. It is a huge portion and should share with at least 4 people! We have such a good time to eat this together and talk about our own food experience with our manager. Our Chinese food scare everybody, such as jelly fish, grass jelly honey tea, they think Chinese people are crazy to eat and love these wired food!

Safety begins with everybody! Last night while I started to work, I opened a linen room’s door and stepped out. Suddenly a housekeeping car ran to me and stopped just in front of me in a second, because the speed of the car changed so quickly by a housekeeper, a drawer on the car fell down immediately and a lot of stuff scattering on the floor of the hallway, including the broken glasses. I helped the housekeeper to pick up everything except the broken glasses because I knew it was unsafe for me to touch the broken glasses by my bare hands. However I saw a couple with their child were going to their room and stopped because our housekeeping cars blocked their way. I found the lady was walking without shoes, I reminded her that there were small pieces broken glasses on the floor and she should be very careful when she was walking. I know this housekeeper is in rush to go home because she finishes her job late, but the safety is the number one key which is repeated everyday during our work, especially we don’t want to see our guests to have this kind of bad experience in Disney.

I am a lucky CP to have second round-table and the person we meet is our general manger Mim. We only have an hour to talk with her, she focuses our training, transportation and housing. CPs complain a lot of apartments’ condition and inspection, and she concerns every detail we share with her. Mim works for Disney more than 40 years, we really want to know her experience with Disney and get some advise from her, I believe everyone has bunch of questions for her, but the time is too short to talk more with her, that is the only pity we have for this wonderful meeting.

This week our manager restarts to emphasize the importance of our service to the guests. She says every guest who spends hundreds of dollars per night wants the best service in our resort as a VIP. It is all about details, for example, our turn-down service is a small service, but we should make sure everything is clean once we enter the room and do this service; even if guests refuse our service, we should report to the base to avoid the complain from other guests later on. Furthermore, manager asks us a question, “what if guest would like to eat on 10:30pm and what kinds of places we can tell them to go?” She wants us to know every dinning place in our resort and the closing time so that we can provide correct information to everyone.

I am Yacht runner on Saturday, and I get a call to deliver an alarm clock to a room. When I go down base to ask a new one, I am told that I should check the one in the room to find the problems. Therefore I go to the guest’s room and find out that the iHome’s radio, the charger and the alarm clock are working very well, and I don’t understand why he calls us; however when I ask guest what is wrong with the iHome, he says the charger is slow! I really want to argue with him, “Excuse me, sir! It doesn’t the formal charger for the phone, it is just an iHome with other functions, the charger should be slow than the formal one!” Can I say this to my guest? I don’t think so. Based on what manager talks about guests’ satisfaction, I smile and ask him nicely if he prefers to change a new iHome, and then I get a good one for him from the warehouse. It is a very good practice for my patience.

So many turn-down service this week! As housekeeping, usually we just have 8-hour shift, but I have 6-hour shift for three days this week. This shift we only do turn-down service for our special guests; no late service, no linen room, and no break time either. Because the Sears company stay in our resort three days for their convention, to give them the best Disney impression, we offer our excellent turn-down service every night for every Sears staff.

The first night everyone just arrives in resort, the frequent question they ask is what is turn-down service. I explain everything to them and most people refuse my service, but they are happy to have our Disney chocolate all the time. The second day I have more than 50 rooms for turn-down service, the best part is the rooms are clean enough, so I just need to create chocolate magic for them. The last day is a tough day. The company has party at night, everybody goes to party after taking shower in the room. Therefore, my turn-down service becomes another kind of late service, make the beds, change the dirty towels and dry the bathrooms. However, the amazing thing is we have Dove new chocolate for our guests! This is a sort of mint dark chocolate, and it is a new product which is not sold in the market yet. We have limited amount and only for our special guests! I wish they all have magic days in our Disney resort!

This week is a very busy week, I work more than 60 hours. Last Sunday, I went to work on 1 PM to help AM housekeepers because they have hundreds of check-out rooms on that day. Firstly, manger Kevin sent me to pull out dirty sheets in every check-out room. Late on the other manger Eric asked me to help housekeeper Emma because her arm was hurt and she wanted to go home, but they are so busy that they can’t allow her to go home right away. Eric told me while I was helping Emma, I can ask any questions about AM housekeeping because I never do AM shift before, this is a kind of experiential learning for me. I help her make beds and she cleaned bathrooms, she taught me how to clean and organize room more faster.

On Wednesday I am a custodial from 10 AM to 4 PM. That is my first time to work in a hotel’s lobby as a custodial. My duty is to keep guest’s restrooms and lobby clean. The lobby is so busy that I check trash cans, floor, towels and toilet papers every 15 minutes, I should make sure these public areas look clean and nice all the time. It is an easy job to handle, but is hard to keep them clean in every second. I’d like to work in different areas to gain my experience and learn new knowledge and skills.

My Experiential Learning class is awesome! Our instructor Debi combines learning theory and learning practice perfectly. Before we have kinds of activities such as to recognize the lime between the paper one and the real one, to visit the theme park Epcot and ride three attractions to figure out the relationship between education and entertainment. This Thursday we have games to play！Debi gives us six games and we should choose two of them which we would like to play and one of them that we don’t want to play. After this learning experience, we are asked we enjoy the game we like or dislike; I have fun with the one I don’t like because I find the interesting part that I never realize before! What I learn from this lesson is try to do something different or unusual and I will have my life surprise experience which is good for me.

One of our managers says that our PM housekeeping is a kind of work we have more individual work done by ourselves because everyone has different linen room to fill out and guest room to clean, we don’t have a lot of time to work together as a team. Therefore we need to learn how to work individually. However our CPs prefer to work together. On my side, I always finish my work first and then go to help somebody else, but some of them like another way: I help you first and then you help me later on because they don’t want to work lonely. I think it is important to work as a team because we learn how to corporate with each other and it is also important to work by our own.

The PM senior housekeepers are so nice to our CPs and I feel like we are a big family right now. They make delicious food for us because they take care of us like their children and wish us can eat better; and we buy them some special food as well and do the massage which they really need and like it. They are all the best.

I am an extra housekeeper last Sunday! That means I have nothing to do! After asking manager, I was trained in the base. I learned how to prepare town-down paper for the next day, how to charge the laundry fee from guests, how to take care of phone calls and send to messages housekeepers and runners. From this training, I understand the relationship between base and housekeeping, we are a team and we work together to provide the best service to our guests with their Disney experience.

On Tuesday our CPs have a Product Knowledge Event in Convention Center. We are introduced by different products from resort’s apartments, such as engineering, merchandise, food and beverage, etc. I am impressed by the new product, Disney Magic Band! With this magic band guests can make room and restaurant reservations, check-in without going to front desk, make payment for everything in Disney, it is a magic!

We have College Program Roundtable meeting this week. Our managers would like to know how we are doing so far and listen to us. Many of us talk about our schedule and bus problems, our short-time training and communication with our trainers. Actually the full-time employees they are all very nice to us, they help us at first because we are not sure what we are doing and feel nervous sometimes. We get along with each other very well.