It's true. All of it.

Did you ever hear a good piece of gossip and then realize that it’s actually about you? Has your legend ever grown so large that you don’t even recognize it any more?

Mine has.

Let me tell you a tale…
Back in 2003, on my Disney College Program, I was trained against my will to drive parade floats at Animal Kingdom. Normally, people had to request to be trained in something like that, and getting chosen required a fair bit of seniority. The fact that Mickey’s Jammin’ Jungle Parade was, at least at one point, required to conscript its float drivers should be a sign of things to come in this blog post.

Driving a parade float is not like driving a car. Sure, you’re only going like two miles an hour, but you’re basically driving a two-story tall double-wide that weighs at least several times as much as my Hyundai Elantra (Zippy). There are times when you have mere inches of clearance between your vehicle (or the people on your vehicle) and some architectural structure hanging down above you or jutting out from the side of the route. And because they did weigh at least several times as much as Zippy, one could expect that the mechanisms intended to control turning and braking functioned, in practice, more like making a suggestion to the floats and saying pretty please and employing puppy dog eyes to see if it would grace you with compliance.

When I went through my approval trial to drive floats, I’d only worked at the company for a handful of weeks. It just now occurred to me that when I started driving floats, I’d only been driving actual cars for a couple of years. I didn’t really feel comfortable with it, although I wasn’t really in much of a position to press the issue. Yet, somehow, I didn’t make any mistakes on my approval run, and they approved me, even though I assured them repeatedly that it was a terrible idea.

Disney doesn’t give paid sick leave (or at least, it didn’t back then), and especially not to its College Program employees, who could face steep consequences for taking too many sick days. The infinite wisdom of this policy is how you wind up with 20-year-olds showing up for work under the influence of powerful cold medicines due to a particularly nasty sinus infection, and then those 20-year-olds wind up operating heavy machinery. On this particular day, the heavy machinery I’d been assigned to operate was my least favorite parade float: the elephant.

While some of the floats were a lot easier to operate because they were essentially modified jeeps towing a trailer, there were a number of floats that were meant to look like artistic interpretations of various animals. The elephant float had an extra little quirk: its gigantic ears were animatronic, and flapped back and forth as you drove along. There was one point on the route where we crossed a bridge lined with lamp posts. All the other floats had plenty of clearance, but with the elephant, the ears had to be pulled back all the way flat against its head, and the driver had to be going straight down the center of the route, or the ears would hit things. The driver had to turn off the switch for the ears at the exact moment when they were at the very end of a flap before heading across this bridge. It was like trying to time a jump in Super Mario Brothers on one of those levels with all the moving platforms, except in this case there were real world consequences if you missed.

On this day, in my Dayquil-addled haze, I missed.

Either I didn’t have the ears retracted all the way, or I was slightly off-center, or a combination of the two, but for whatever reason, when I came to the bridge, I accidentally dinged the ears against a lamp post. Knowing that if I overcorrected I would just hit the lamp post on the other side, I didn’t correct enough and hit a second lamppost on the same side. Because we were driving at approximately the speed of smell, it all happened in kind of slow motion, with me anxiously looking up and trying to gauge whether I’d left enough room or not, and then cringing and looking away as there was a loud dinging noise and the hanging lamp began swinging wildly back and forth.

Twice.

There was no room for guests to stand along this portion of the parade route, so mercifully, my humiliation is not posted on Youtube or anything. However, because of the notorious danger of this part of the route, there was always a parade captain stationed near the bridge, and he saw the whole thing and immediately began radioing it in. It didn’t look to me like the lamps were damaged. When I parked my float back in the float bay after the parade, I inspected it carefully and didn’t see any damage to the ears, either.

When I’d finished inspecting my float, my face hurt from the sinus infection, my brain hurt from Dayquil, I knew that someone else had seen the incident happen and was already notifying the appropriate authorities, I was pretty sure no people or things had been broken, and none of the managers were back from the parade route yet. So I sat down on a bench outside the float barn and waited for someone to tell me what one does when one’s 90-day employment probation has not yet been completed, and one causes potential property damage to a theme park with a large vehicle, because honestly, I really wasn’t sure what the next step was.

Eventually, I heard my name being called over the PA system and reported to the manager’s office.

A manager was sitting behind his desk, with two more standing behind him, as well as a Union rep. I felt like at least one of them needed to be steepling their fingers.

“Hi Laura. We got a report that your float struck an object on the parade route.”

“Yes, two lamp posts.”

“We’re going to need you to fill out a witness statement explaining what happened.”

They had introduced us to the concept of witness statements in training. Basically, it was a document that created a paper trail of the event, in your own words, in case they decided to discipline you. I tried to fill it out the way they’d told us to: skip the opinions, guesses and commentary, and keep it as factual as possible. I mentally added my own rule of thumb when dealing with surly authority figures: do not admit fault. I didn’t hit a lamp post with the elephant float. The elephant float’s ear hit a lamp post. Or two.

After reading my statement and discussing with me and amongst themselves, the manager triumvirate reached their conclusion. “Since your employment record is clear, and there was no damage, we are going to put this on your record as a warning, and you will not receive a reprimand.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“But we did want to ask you,” another manager interjected. Straight out of a scene from a terrible movie, she cleared her throat meaningfully. “We’re curious why you didn’t report immediately to the manager’s office when you arrived back at the parade building to report this incident.”

I looked at them weird. That seemed like a dumb question, and my brain was very, very, medicated and tired. “The guy with the radio saw me do it. I saw him see me do it. I figured you guys would already know. I also saw that there was no damage. So if you wanted to talk to me, I figured you would call me in here.”

The managers did not immediately reply. I think they were trying to decide if a bluntly delivered list of perfectly logical reasons counted as insubordination.

“Also,” I continued, because I saw this as a one-time opportunity to end this parade nightmare,  “I warned you guys back during my approval process that I wasn’t sure I’d be comfortable doing this, and I’m clearly not very good at it. Is there any way to get float driving removed from my skill list?”

Their answer that day was ‘we’ll see’. It took a panic attack and a visit from the paramedics on the morning of my next parade shift, but I did eventually convince them that I shouldn’t be trusted to drive large, unwieldy vehicles.

Over the ensuing years of full-time employment, as I started performing in shows, training new cast members, and facilitating youth education programs, there were so many other places I was needed that it was pretty rare for me to wind up back at Animal Kingdom very much. Still, every now and then, when it was the slow season and they needed something to fill in my work schedule, I would wind up randomly filling in over there.

One of the most coveted ‘filler’ shifts anyone in our department could get was a ‘van driver’ shift. Basically, in order for all of the various entertainment offerings to happen in a Disney theme park, a lot of people need to get shuttled around behind the scenes, usually with some heavy equipment in tow. Every park had at least one person assigned to an eight hour shift of doing nothing but all of that shuttling. It was a nice break for a person whose normal shift required several hours of intense physical activity (like parades and shows), or a lot of public speaking and mental load (like training or teaching youth programs). The only downside was that the vehicle you’d be driving was a twelve-passenger van. These things were not your mom’s Kia–they were both longer and taller, and even the folks who got to drive them every day sometimes misjudged the clearance and wound up putting a scrape on them.

Still, it was far less unwieldy than a parade float.

So one day, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was Animal Kingdom’s van driver, and I would get a little break from punishing my muscles and taxing my brain. I settled in to my twelve-passenger van for the day and started making my pickups and dropoffs, one of which was to grab a bunch of performers from the other end of the park and bring them back to the parade building to prepare for parade.

I recognized one guy–I’d seen him in one of the training groups several weeks back, although I hadn’t trained him myself. That couldn’t have been more than six months ago, I thought, and he was already performing in parades, which was pretty unusual. Then again, everyone else in my van seemed to be even newer to the company than he was.

The amusing thing was that all of them were clearly TRYING to sound like they’re been doing this forever.

I mostly tuned out their chit chat as I backed up the van. “Are you stiltwalking today, Eric?” Eric. That’s right, that was his name. He’d been pretty full of himself in training, from what I’d seen…

“Yeah, you?”

“I’m on one of the jeeps.”

“Nice! Easy day for you, then!”

“Nope. Sue’s my driver. It’ll be brake-checks the whole way.”

“Ugh, the drivers!” Interjected a petite brunette performer, who was clearly just trying to get in on this conversation because she was totally into Eric. “Every driver I’ve had so far is terrible! It’s not like it’s hard!”

“Hey,” Eric said, “it could be worse. You’ve heard about the girl who crashed the elephant float, right?”

I glanced at Eric in the rear view. You have my attention, I thought.

Eric had noted the little brunette’s interest and was now clearly intent on showing off for her. “A few years ago, some ditzy College Program girl got approved to drive floats,” he began. “She was REALLY bad at it, and they kept letting her off with warnings, until one day she finally drove the elephant right into one of the lamp posts on the bridge.”

This sounds slightly familiar, I thought. But only slightly.

“How do you even do that?” The brunette squealed. “You’re not even going fast!”

“Like I said, she was a total idiot,” Eric continued. “The float was totaled, she completely crushed the lamp post, the performer got thrown off and had to go to the hospital… It was, like, really bad.”

“Oh my gosh!”

(Hmm. Maybe this is a different ditzy College Program girl…who had an incident with the elephant float…in the past few years…Feel like I would have heard about something this bad, though.)

I could only describe what was going on in the back seat now as ‘Eric holding court’. Everyone back there was hanging on his every word. I mean, I was too at this point, but my motives were completely different.

“The best part?” Eric continued. “When she finally got back to the float barn, she just acted like nothing happened. Like, she didn’t even say anything to the managers or anyone. She just clocked out and left like it wasn’t a big deal.”

Ah, I thought. I see we are talking about me. Although, I don’t quite remember some of these details. And what’s with all the College Program hate, Eric? Didn’t your program just end, like, three weeks ago, if I’m doing my math right? Obviously, though, I didn’t want to interrupt him. Making him look bad in front of the brunette just wouldn’t be very cool of me. I kept my eyes on the road and pulled the van up to the parade building.

As the performers all filed out, chuckling about the idiocy of the College Program girl from days of yore, I exited and went around to the back of the van to help them all unload their equipment. Eric was still talking about the Great Elephant Float Crash of 2003. “I heard they chased her down in the parking lot to fire her and take away her company ID,” he was saying as I handed him a large black bag full of oddly shaped equipment.

“Really?” I said. “I heard she still works here, and they let her drive twelve-passenger vans.”