A long day!

I meant to write this post last night but I was so tired I went practically straight to bed! Let's start from the beginning of my second face to face interview with the Walt Disney company...

5am: Alarm goes off. Ugh, too early. After lying in bed for a further 10 minutes I thought I'd better get up. Don't get me wrong, I was excited and nervous but this had caused bad sleep so I felt really tired! Got up, got dressed, applied 'Disney Look' make-up, told myself off for not ironing my shirt before leaving Bristol the day before and got my bag together, triple checking all my documents.

6am: I had booked a taxi for 6am from Salisbury Hospital's main entrance (I was staying in the nurses's accommodation, i.e. Tom's flat, as it was easier to get a train from here than Bournemouth thanks to engineering works). Thought it was better to be on the early side... well, £10 later I was already at the station for 6.10am. Ended up getting on the train that was already on the platform which was the 6.17am train to London. Because it was a Saturday, my ticket meant that I could get any train I wanted there and back which was fab because it was only a £20 return!

7.50am: I arrive at London Waterloo a full 1 hour and 40 minutes before I needed to be in Hammersmith so I went to Burger King and had a very yummy egg and bacon 'butty' thing with little hash browns and orange juice. After hanging around for a bit, having a quick chat with Tom on the phone and smartening myself up in the toilets it was about 8.20am so I headed to the Underground to top up my Oyster card and get onto the tube.

8.55am: I arrive at Hammersmith tube station. It's one of those annoying ones which has about 3 exits so I just head for the first one I see and it comes out on a main road. It then occurred to me why it is good to be early when you don't know where you're going! I had heard on the forums that there were two entrances to the Disney HQ... finding the first one wasn't too difficult but after a quick scout around I couldn't see another one. What I did see however, was a couple of people looking a bit nervous and standing around near Disney HQ so I went in head first and asked them if they were there for the same reason as me! They were :P

9.15am: By now there was about 20 of us hanging around outside the main entrance, with no clear way of getting in! Eventually someone came down and collected us, took us right round to the back of the building to the back entrance - helpful. The Disney HQ is amazing...lovely big posters everywhere with the movies on them and sculptures/artwork of Mickey and other characters. So Cool. So we all signed in and then were taken upstairs to a waiting area with lots of comfy chairs. It was nothing like the last interview with Disney where I was in a restaurant! Random.

9.45am: We are all taken into this screening room place, essentially a cinema with really cool reclining seats! Then Jill and Jeff (brilliantly American recruiters straight from WDW) did the presentation which I have seen before... rather amusing and quite interesting. Before the presentation we did another trivia quiz where I won a ICP pin :-)

10.45am: We are told our interview times - mine is at 5.40pm!!! So late! I had thought that if I had travelled from further away then it would be reasonably early but obviously not! So, we all went back downstairs to the entrance to the building as we had so long to wait. I had been chatting to 3 other girls called Amy, Hannah and Emily so we decided to go and do something together as our interviews were all later in the afternoon. As I had promised to meet up with Victoria I thought it would be nice for her to come with us too so we all met up at the Pizza Hut on Oxford St.

12.30pm: So, we sit in Pizza Hut and had a good value for money lunch of pizza and garlic bread (for me) which was very nice. Victoria recounted the under 21 drinking story from the ICP08 and the others asked her and me lots of questions about the program which was great. I basically spent the whole day talking about Disney! After we had finished at Pizza Hut, Amy and Emily decided it would be best if they headed back to Hammersmith because not all the tubes were running so it was taking a bit longer to get around. I said goodbye to Victoria and told her I'd see her in January when I'm back in London again!

2pm: Hannah and I attempted to get to the shopping mall that had been mentioned earlier in the day located at White City (i.e. where the BBC is... excitement!) but because the tubes were so rubbish we ended up back in Hammersmith where we wandered around this little shopping centre. We sat and discussed the roles and what we were going to go for... I decided to go for character attendant as 1st option, operations as 2nd and merchandise as 3rd. More on this later...

3.30pm: We decide to go back to Disney HQ as we wanted somewhere comfy to sit down and with the hope that we could get an earlier interview we headed back. Cue about 1 hour and 20 minutes of sitting around, chatting to other people about the program and getting our paperwork checked.

4.45pm: Really funny coincidence. I was supposed to have my interview with a guy who hadn't come back yet so Katie (I think that was her name) from Yummy Jobs just went... "Well how about you two go together then!". So for the 2nd year running, I ended up having my interview with someone I had been hanging around with all day! Whilst I was chatting to the girls from Yummy Jobs, she told me that the roles they had the most positions for were Custodial, QS F+B, Housekeeping and.... Operations. Now in theory this would be fab as it was my 2nd choice on the form but I am worried I will end up at Downtown Disney or Wide World of Sports as a ticket seller which would be crappy... but then I guess it's the risk you take with any of the roles. I could equally end up in a resort doing merchandise which is what I was worried about last time and I ended up in MK.

5pm: Me and Hannah go in for our interview with Jeff. I think it went pretty well... he asked me questions about why I wanted to go back, what roles I had chosen (I tried to emphasize to him I really wanted to be in the parks because I really loved working in MK last time, who knows if that helped or not) and he told me that they had changed the role of character attendant now so that you don't move around all the parks, you are assigned an area of a park for the whole time. Don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing...

5.20pm: So at the time I was supposed to be going in for my interview, I came out of it! I hope it went reasonably well. At the end of the day I guess it's better to be working for Disney in a role that wasn't my top choice than not at all but fingers crossed that I get my first choice and end up back in one of the four main parks! That would be brilliant, I can't explain how excited I would be!! So, interview over, we all said goodbye to each other - exchanged numbers and facebook names!

6.50pm: Back at Waterloo I had my third fast food meal of the day - a McFlurry. So piggy! I decided to get on the train that terminated at Salisbury so that I wouldn't get back too late. I didn't want to have to get 2 taxis in one day particularly! Got back to Salisbury at about 8.20pm and got the bus back to the hospital.

10pm: After having a well needed shower and tidy up, it was time for bed after a very long day. Rumour has it (straight from the YJ mouth!) the earliest we'll know is Friday and if not then the week after... i.e. next week. Kinda scary but it will be good to know asap so I can get on with organising my life! In the meantime I have loads of uni work to be getting on with which is what I should be doing right now so I had better go get on with some more procrastination!

Wish me luck!

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