For many, the question illustrates what they consider to be the vacation-induced stupidity of theme park guests. I mean, c'mon, they just answered their question in the question. The parade's at three o'clock. Duh.
But as emotionally satisfying as it might seem to think yourself smarter than all those tourists out there, as a cast member, it's not your job to put people down. Quite the opposite, in fact. It's your job to do whatever you can to help them feel like they're having the best day of their lives.
So... no mocking the guests for asking the time of the three o'clock parade. Just fire up that Disney smile and give 'em the answer.
"3:15," I replied, when asked one day early in my Walt Disney World career.
I hadn't mean to say anything other than "3:00," but for some reason, I felt like I should respond with the time that the parade would pass the point where we were standing in Frontierland, instead of the time when the parade first stepped off on Main Street. (The afternoon parades back then stared on Main Street and proceeded around the hub and into Liberty Square before ending in Frontierland.)
The guest smiled and turned back toward his family, happy with my answer.
He'd known that the three o'clock parade started on Main Street at three o'clock. He wasn't the idiot that some short-sighted cast members made folks like him out to be. What that guest really wanted to know, and inelegantly asked, was "at what time does the three o'clock parade get here?"
Reflexively, I'd given him the correct answer.
Lesson learned. The answer you should give as a cast member isn't always to the question the guest asks. The answer you should give is to the question that the guest meant to ask.
From then on, I treated guest questions like I was Encyclopedia Brown on a case: Each one was a potential mystery to be unraveled, then solved.
A woman entering Pirates of the Caribbean who asked "Is this ride okay for kids?" really wanted to know if there were any snakes on the ride, because she had a phobia.
A couple who asked "How long does this ride take?" when boarding my Tom Sawyer Island raft didn't care how long it'd take me to drive the thing across the river. They wanted to know when they'd have to be back to the island-side dock so that they would make their 1:30 Diamond Horseshoe reservations.
Deciphering a guest question properly can save more than a restaurant reservation. A man outside Country Bear Jamboree who asked me, "Where can I rent a wheelchair?" really meant "My grandmother's passed out from the heat and could you call us a nurse, please?" (Fortunately, I figured that one out almost immediately, and had a medical "alpha unit" on the way within seconds.)
What time is the three o'clock parade? Maybe it's at 3:15, or 3:25, depending where you're standing when asked. Or maybe the correct answer is "I'm sorry, sir, but the parade doesn't come here into Tomorrowland." Or even "You'll hear an announcement if the parade is delayed or cancelled due to the weather."
The only thing stupid about questions like this one are the people who don't take the time and make the effort to find out what the person asking really needs to know.
To read more of Robert's stories about working at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom, visit themeparkinsider.com/stories.
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love reading your website ,
it's a nice moment to check it everyday and prepare myself for my first time to Disneyworld! (been in disneyland paris lots of times and last year at Disneyland)
Thanks for all the work you put in here,
kind regards,
Dominique,
Rotterdam,
Netherlands
There always seems to be a question behind the question.
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Then again, I probably would have said stupidly 3pm thinking the guest did not realize they said the time of the parade.