Awful Experience Registering for DAS Pass

[prettypatchesmsu]

The above-described experience makes a lot more sense now that the new changes have been announced. They really must just think we're all fakers trying to abuse the system.

Some of the cast members in Magic Kingdom certainly seemed to have a nasty attitude about it on Saturday. On Tron, in the locker rooms where you must use either a physical card or a Magic Band to open a locker, my annual pass was not scanning. I keep it in a plastic case in my lanyard, as I will drop/lose it if I take it out, and have had no trouble getting it to scan at any other turnstiles. I picked a case on purpose that is almost impossible to open, so that I couldn't lose the card, and taking it out to hope it scans better wasn't an option. I approached a female cast member and asked her for a card, please. She refused to give me one, told me to "use my pass," and waved me away. I told her it wasn't working, and she told me, contempt plain in her voice, that IT'LL WORK!!!

I returned to the locker I was trying to open and continued to try to open the locker, with it continually not registering the card. Instead of helping, the cast member continued to yell at me to KEEP SCANNING IT!! and TAKE IT OUT OF THE CASE!! I was the last person in the room at this point. I was tearing up from the humiliation of it at this point because all the virtual queue people waiting to come into the locker room were staring at me. I started hitting myself in the head, which made them stare more, which made it worse. My mother approached and told the woman to give her a card or she was going to have that cast member's job for bullying an Autistic guest (which I don't agree with, but I can't control her).

We got the card, got the locker open, and I was able to calm myself down with one of my stimming devices. I was able to ride, and the lady actually manning the ride was very patient in showing me how to get on the bike, and let me keep ear defenders on. She was very nice when she asked me to please put my lanyard in the bike's cubby and it was explained it was just so that my pins didn't poke me.

All in all, it was a great ride, but I don't understand why the locker room cast member felt the need to be so nasty. I just wanted a plastic card. I was going to give it back, you return them at the end of the ride anyway.

Oh wow, I’m so sorry. I can feel your frustration in your telling of it! Yay for Mom! I’ve also been yelled at by CM before for taking too long or needing assistance or asking another question. It really sticks in my brain and unfortunately I can recall those instances like a movie in my brain. It does make me shy about asking for help or clarifying something. I wish I could just blow things off like that like others do, but it really ruins my day as I start to obsess about it.

 

[Keladry84]

I'm sorry that you've had to deal with those interactions. It is very frustrating. I'm also autistic and similar to what a PP said, those things tend to stick in the head and circulate rather than being easily dismissed.

The suggestion to write down what you want to say is a very good one. For my DAS interview, I didn't write down but rehearsed multiple times what I wanted to say. For my job accommodations when I requested them, I literally wrote a script and read it!

I noticed that you had some difficulty in the interview when the CM didn't follow the "script" per se. One thing that I found helps me with this is when preparing ahead of time, to brainstorm the different reactions and/or questions the CM might say or have, and then how I could respond to it. It helps me prepare a little bit better when it goes off-course from the standard.

 

[ttintagel]

Speaking as a person who mostly needs accommodations that aren't handled under DAS, and therefore has to state their case to a different CM at every single attraction and hope that they're in the mood to be helpful that day, my experience has been that the ratio of caring CMs who want to listen and help, to CMs who act like they're getting paid a bonus every time they make a disabled person's life harder, is about 1:1. Levels of casual ableism and ignorance seem to be about the same among Park employees as they do among the general public.

One thing I'm hoping from their bringing this third-party company in on the DAS applications is that maybe it will help keep Disney CMs consistent, rather than relying on their own individual, pre-existing biases to make decisions about who gets accommodations and who doesn't.
I think inconsistency is a much bigger problem than the "fraud" Disney is insisting happens on a grand scale. They said the same thing about GAC, and the switch to DAS was supposed to fix that, so clearly that wasn't the problem it was made out to be, and probably still isn't. Ever since changes were announced, I've seen all kinds of people coming out of the woodwork saying that they're regularly approved for DAS for issues that are explicitly not supposed to be covered, and even more saying that they receive both DAS and other accommodations for issues that I and many others I know are usually denied. I think it's probably the same old Disney problem of understaffing, lack of training, and lack of support from management.