2006-10-Day

Walt Disney World

Symposium 2006

Orlando, Florida

October 07-15, 2006

When I awoke, there was under-the-door spam. I made coffee and jumped in the shower.

Classes all day. The wireless provided by the conference is awesome! You don’t even have to go back to the room to do some work between classes. Just find a place to park yourself and you’re in business. You also can log into the Gartner website during a session and follow along with the presentation. This way you don’t have to get out your glasses to see the screen at the front of the room.

Small gathering between the folks from my firm and the Gartner reps was had this evening, at a restaurant in the Dolphin called The Blue Zoo. We had appetizers only, because this was also the night of playing in the parks. Last year it was the Magic Kingdom. This year, they shut down Disney-MGM Studios for the evening.

Two of my colleagues and I excused ourselves and made for the atrium to get in line for the bus. The line was HUGE, and we stood in it a very long time. Frankly, we could have WALKED to MGM faster.

It was kinda neat the way they brought us in. The buses unloaded at the end of the Streets where the Osborne lights happen each Christmas. In keeping with the movie theme of the park, we walked the red carpet that was lined by “paparazzi” and “fans”, complete with glaring lights and flashes. The marquis on the theater welcomed the Gartner Symposium to the parks, and the fans screamed and waved signs.

I have to say I liked the Magic Kingdom night in 2005 better. MGM is a two-ride park during the day, and on this night, the rest of the park was largely shut up and vacant. They had the DJ under the Big Ass Hat, with Chip and Dale trying to induce the crowd to dance. Buffet was set up in the street leading up to the Tower of Terror. Ice cream and beer and wine carts were dotted here and there. Only one of the shops was open, and there seemed, in general, to be a lot less people in this park than there were at last year’s Magic Kingdom gathering.

Mulan has discovered that her father and all the other men in the village have been called to war by the Emperor, because the Huns have invaded China. Many of the other old men are sending their sons instead. Mulan's father does not have a son, and he is old and never recovered from his previous war injuries. Yet he will go to fight for his country, because honor is a high priority for him.

Well, in the middle of the night, Mulan sneaks out of bed and puts her father's armor on and rides away to take his place, posing as "Ping", the son she made up. But in order to be a soldier, she has to cut off her hair. The rest of the story is that she goes on to become a hero that saves all of China.

As a gender, women have been socialized to think that certain things are "feminine", and therefore, we should desire and/or aspire to those things. But sometimes, those are the very things that hold us back from achievement. Sometimes, you have to have the guts to shed the trappings of "femininity", the things that society expects of you as a woman, in order to achieve your dreams.

I became bored pretty quickly, and decided to leave. I don’t do the Tower of Terror (fear of vertebral compression), so for me, it was in fact a one-ride park. After waiting in the long line at the Dolphin and finally making my way to the back of the park, the line for Rock-n-Roller Coaster was 45 minutes. That made it a zero ride park. I don’t wait that long during the day, making judicious use of fast pass, and I’d be dipped in shit if I was going to wait that long to ride something during a private event. Using MGM for these purposes is just a bad, bad idea.

The time stamps on my photos indicate I was back at the Dolphin by 9:24 PM. I took a stroll along the Boardwalk, and then went back to the room. Met the spam fairy again, who smiled apologetically as I passed. Didn’t stop him from slipping a spam under the door; I heard the tell-tale *whoosh* of paper sliding along the tiled floor, turned around, and there it was.