Ema Earns Her Ears: My Secret Walt Disney World Cast Member Diary (Earning Your Ears Book 2) by Ema Hutton
Authors: Ema Hutton
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phone number that I needed a visa for Disney’s college program, which I’d also done the year before. Since I was applying for the same category of visa within the span of 12 months, I didn’t have to physically go to the embassy if I didn’t want to, which as I live at the other end of the country, was definitely music to my ears. I still had to pay their fees and fill out their forms, but at least I wouldn’t have to pay for a train and sit for hours in their waiting room for them to see me.
The next day, March 26, I rang the courier to have my stuff collected. They said they’d stop by anywhere from 6am to 8pm the following day. This meant I had to get up super early, and as I was in the house alone, I soon got super bored. I had to sit near the front door so I wouldn’t miss their knock. At 9:35am, a woman arrived in a normal-looking car and announced herself as from the courier service. I was kind of skeptical handing over sensitive documents to a random woman in a regular car when I was expecting a courier van and a representative in uniform. However, she showed me an envelope with the courier logo printed on the side, and I had to take the receipt for the courier service out of my pile of documents and put everything else inside the envelope. She sealed it in front of me and asked me to sign for it, and off she went.
chapter twenty-eight
DORMS
On April 18, 2013, Disney released a post online that sent the ICP Facebook group crazy. Disney was changing our living experience on the program. Before now, we had been allocated housing and had no say in who we wanted to live with. However, American participants could select their roommates and housing complex preference. Disney had seen how successful it had been with the American participants, and so decided to offer the same perk to international participants.
I knew right away that I wanted to be Amy’s roommate; I just didn’t know if she wanted to be mine. It was 3 days after the news had come out, and I was thinking of a way to bring the roommate idea up with her. It was as nerve-wracking as asking someone out on a date. After discussing our preferences for housing complexes and the benefits of living at Vista with all the shops right on your doorstep, it seemed that we were in agreement on housing. The conversation continued:
Amy: Are you gonna request to live with someone who you met last year?
Ema: Well, all my friends who are going back are over 21, and two of them arrive on the 3rd, but they all want to live in an over-21 apartment, so I don’t know what to do.
Amy: Aww, well, we could always request to be together?
Ema: Yes!! I would love that.
Amy: Getting excited again now!
The pre-registration started in May 2013, and all we knew was that we would receive an email 10 days before our arrival date and could then fill in our pre-registration. It wasn’t until May 29 when the first wave of emails were sent out. Amy got hers first, and mine closely followed. The first thing Amy said was: “Right, how do we do it?”
We each set up an account in DORMS. This part took forever . I fell at the first hurdle. We got two emails, one with the instructions and the link to follow to start the process and the other with a temporary password that we could use until we reset it during registration. I swear that resetting my password was the world’s most difficult struggle, much tougher than deciding what to eat for lunch some days. So many rules and restrictions! Rule number 1: Your password can’t contain words from the dictionary. WHAT?! Am I just supposed to throw a load of letters together and hope I remember it. The next problem was that, as far as I’m aware, proper names aren’t in the dictionary. But, according to the registration form, proper names are in the dictionary, and so you can’t have those, either. I snuck around the system by taking a few letters from my first name and my last and then added a load of numbers on the end. I wrote
The next day, March 26, I rang the courier to have my stuff collected. They said they’d stop by anywhere from 6am to 8pm the following day. This meant I had to get up super early, and as I was in the house alone, I soon got super bored. I had to sit near the front door so I wouldn’t miss their knock. At 9:35am, a woman arrived in a normal-looking car and announced herself as from the courier service. I was kind of skeptical handing over sensitive documents to a random woman in a regular car when I was expecting a courier van and a representative in uniform. However, she showed me an envelope with the courier logo printed on the side, and I had to take the receipt for the courier service out of my pile of documents and put everything else inside the envelope. She sealed it in front of me and asked me to sign for it, and off she went.
chapter twenty-eight
DORMS
On April 18, 2013, Disney released a post online that sent the ICP Facebook group crazy. Disney was changing our living experience on the program. Before now, we had been allocated housing and had no say in who we wanted to live with. However, American participants could select their roommates and housing complex preference. Disney had seen how successful it had been with the American participants, and so decided to offer the same perk to international participants.
I knew right away that I wanted to be Amy’s roommate; I just didn’t know if she wanted to be mine. It was 3 days after the news had come out, and I was thinking of a way to bring the roommate idea up with her. It was as nerve-wracking as asking someone out on a date. After discussing our preferences for housing complexes and the benefits of living at Vista with all the shops right on your doorstep, it seemed that we were in agreement on housing. The conversation continued:
Amy: Are you gonna request to live with someone who you met last year?
Ema: Well, all my friends who are going back are over 21, and two of them arrive on the 3rd, but they all want to live in an over-21 apartment, so I don’t know what to do.
Amy: Aww, well, we could always request to be together?
Ema: Yes!! I would love that.
Amy: Getting excited again now!
The pre-registration started in May 2013, and all we knew was that we would receive an email 10 days before our arrival date and could then fill in our pre-registration. It wasn’t until May 29 when the first wave of emails were sent out. Amy got hers first, and mine closely followed. The first thing Amy said was: “Right, how do we do it?”
We each set up an account in DORMS. This part took forever . I fell at the first hurdle. We got two emails, one with the instructions and the link to follow to start the process and the other with a temporary password that we could use until we reset it during registration. I swear that resetting my password was the world’s most difficult struggle, much tougher than deciding what to eat for lunch some days. So many rules and restrictions! Rule number 1: Your password can’t contain words from the dictionary. WHAT?! Am I just supposed to throw a load of letters together and hope I remember it. The next problem was that, as far as I’m aware, proper names aren’t in the dictionary. But, according to the registration form, proper names are in the dictionary, and so you can’t have those, either. I snuck around the system by taking a few letters from my first name and my last and then added a load of numbers on the end. I wrote
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