Disney’s MagicMobile / Apple Wallet

Disney has been running a big IT operation for a really long time; I’ve known people who worked for it … over 20 years ago. In more recent years, the transition to Magic Band (at WDW) and the focus on app development associated with that, and also the reliance upon that vs the Magic Band at DL, has been in and out of the news a lot as an example of an established company being willing to dump a truly impressive amount of money into reworking their processes to take advantage of technological developments that have occurred in the broader world.

Because We Are Crazy People over here, we did not precisely stop going to Disney over the last almost two years now. It’s easy enough to go over this blog and see that we were at DisneyLand in February before the shutdowns, at Hilton Head in June after the shutdowns were letting up, at WDW in April of last year, and at WDW again (and a Disney Cruise) this past holiday season. I’m still dealing with whatever the heck my daughter and I caught on that vacation, but it’s really clear that — at least so far — whatever I caught is remarkably like the head colds of the Before Times that I would catch when traveling and that would knock me out for most of a week and occasionally more. It’s given me pause, to think about how sustainable this is. OTOH, I have a few more years of being a Crazy Person left in me, and I might as well enjoy them before settling down to hide in a woodland paradise with those most closely related to me and whoever else chooses to visit.

And so I continue to think about what I would like to travel to and experience in the upcoming and in future years, and I continue to keep up to date on developments so that I am not surprised to arrive at a place I love and have visited often only to realize I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing because they changed it all again.

On this trip, I learned that we are now at V3 of the Magic Band, and V1 (the skinny one) has been officially discontinued. Which is fine; now I can finally dispose of the many that I have sitting around. I did eventually realize that I should pay to get a personalized band (with Grumpy and my name on it, in Purple), and decline the ones that were included with vacations booked at a certain level and above, so at least the ongoing buildup of bands has slowed.

Also, I mostly completely forgot to ask for discounts based on my DVC membership and generally speaking I didn’t have my annual pass _card_ with me, because why the hell would I carry that around, I have the Magic Band. And it turns out, Disney has had a similar thought.

The App Formerly Known as My Disney Experience (and likely other things before that, which has been lost in the mists of my increasingly erratic memory), and the current name of which I am slightly uncertain about, but _definitely_ the WDW app, has a hamburger. If you tap on the hamburger, there is an option called “Disney MagicMobile”. If you tap on that, you can set up a pass. Here’s where it gets interesting.

If you have multiple Disney affiliations — like, an annual card, membership in DVC, have gone on cruises and achieved various levels of Castaway Cay or whatever — and you have linked these affiliations, you will have more options to choose from for setting up your pass. But best of all, you can then add that pass to your AppleWallet (I’m going to assume that there is or will soon be an Android equivalent, but I don’t know, and sometimes there can be a delay, because there are some demographic realities here when it comes to people who have a high degree of commitment to Disney). Also, in MagicMobile is a button to unlock your hotel room door if you are staying on property currently and have set that up in your checkin account.

Anyway, once added to your Wallet, you can use your phone without even lighting up the screen as if it were a Magic Band (cue Privacy Pearl Clutching, also, I’ll be getting back to you soon, so check in on the next post, where I wax prosaic on service in the neo Victorian age). So that’s kind of nice! If you look at the card in your Wallet, and hit the … in the upper right on your phone, you will see a QR code and a bunch of other stuff, including a list of your affiliations, if any. Mine was not initially showing this line, so I blew away the app and the wallet on the carousel, logged into my castaway cay account (for the very first time, as near as I can tell) to ensure that it had activity and would linke, then restarted the wallet and Voila, there it all was — DVC, castaway cay, annual pass. If anyone out there has other Disney affiliations — Club 33, anyone? — I’d dearly love to know if they show up on that line or not.

Waxing Prosaic on Service in Our Neo Victorian Age

When I was a little girl in the 1970s, my oldest sister and my mother liked to watch Masterpiece Theatre. _Upstairs, Downstairs_ was one of the more memorable shows. They also read Jane Austen novels, and P.G. Wodehouse and similar. My mother generally liked cozies; my oldest sister less so. I wound up reading a lot of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and, my favorite of all of it, Dorothy Sayers. (The WGBH adaptations of Sayers were of course later, in the 1980s, and part of Mystery! Not Masterpiece Theatre.)

Having this in the background of my childhood is unsurprising. My parents both came from poor backgrounds and were quite singleminded in their determination to Not Be That Poor Ever Again. They valued education, and the jobs that education granted access to. And while my father was never a great reader himself, disliking sitting still intensely, my mother and her entire family would happily sit reading and neglect absolutely everything else until the world ended, if allowed to do so. It _completely_ _makes_ _sense_ that my striving working class family would Aspire to Better, and primarily access it through Classics, especially the type liable to be aired on PBS.

But on another level, having this in the background of my childhood is absolutely astonishing! This is all very much propaganda in favor of being rich, of marrying rich, justifying being rich, admiring being rich, displaying the power and opportunities available to the rich _and those they chose to share their lives with_. I mean, awesome if you could pull of a Harriet Vine or an Elizabeth Bennet, but honestly, pretty awesome being Bunter or Jeeves! At least, that’s how it looked to this child in the 1970s.

These shows fitted in brilliantly with a set of stock ideas about How To Get and Stay Rich: Only Spend the Interest and Not the Principal, Don’t Live Beyond Your Means, etc. At least, those were the lessons my parents and oldest sister focused on. But the lessons I picked up from all of this weird shit going on in the cultural background of my childhood, very very respectable stuff, were extremely different. Back then, we were all JWs, living in the End Times, waiting for Armageddon but also trying to have a pleasant life since 1975 showed so clearly that it wasn’t actually coming right away. We were Officially Not Materialistic, which is particularly hilarious given the contents of my father’s closet. He may not have been watching a lot of those shows with my mother and my oldest sister, but he had a _high_ degree of commitment to looking like he had a very different job and career than he actually had. He was an electrician — eventually, an electrical inspector — but you’d never know it by the number and quality of his suits, shirts, ties and shoes. Every one of those suits custom tailored to make him look good, which, honestly, wasn’t that hard (see: worked as an electrician and hated to sit still).

Meanwhile, my mother was engaging in a not stealthy at all program against any expectation of marrying and becoming a SAHM. This was pretty realistic. The gender division in every church is tilted heavily female, and the men active in every church are overwhelmingly, if not universally, horrifyingly useless people. (I actually know _one_ man very active in a church who is not only NOT horrifyingly useless, he is actually saintly and is a great provider, so definitely not universal.) It’s a scammy environment on every level. This created enormous conflict with the official anti-college position the JW’s took between when my oldest sister went to college and when I did. But my parents did not blink — they just emphasized that they were not paying for the college that they absolutely wanted me to attend. *sigh*

Also, that electrician bit up above? My grandfather had been a wobbly at least for a bit, and electricians are broadly unionized in Seattle. Also, Seattle. So my family embodied and raised their children simultaneously in an End Times cult, Striving to Better Themselves Through Education, and also as covert, pro-union Democrats (they weren’t allowed to be political because JW, but they were unambiguously Democrats, and super big fans of JFK). They were pretty standard Northern-style racists, and every component of their being was homophobic, transphobic, anti-queeer, you name it, _while simultaneously_ my mother was an enormous fan of every single Big Hollywood Star who we all now know to have definitely not been het.

I’m a pragmatic person. I tried to fit in, failed, flailed, decided this was really stupid, bailed, threw myself into my work as the one aspect of my life that was working, and when an opportunity to both participate in a promising startup AND work at a bookstore dropped into my lap via my boyfriend, I grabbed it and hung on for dear life.

A few years later, I was spat out the other end and embarked on the project of making sense of how I got there. At _that_ point, I had what might variously be termed “a modest independence” or “enough money to retire upon, if I lived frugally”. And it was still possible then to sell out of stock and set up a bond ladder and live off the interest — which I did, with part of it. But of course, interest rates kept dropping and that ceased to be possible.

More and more, the world around me was coming to resemble the chaos that I had learned as an adult was in the background of all those Masterpiece Theatre presentations, and I had come to recognize the actual storyline of all of those brilliant stories as the story of someone who was watching for a gold ring, a real gold ring, and grabbing it when they could, falling down, getting up, dusting themselves off and trying again if they failed. And more and more, I started to see the wild hypocrisy of the confluence of demographic factors that my family of origin embodied.

So, look, here we are now, in 2022, and I don’t like having servants. I’m not sure how my parents would have felt about having servants — they didn’t want to _be_ servants, that’s for sure — but I have my suspicions. But what I do know from all that going on in the background of my life is that _if_ you are well-resourced enough for people to be doing things _for_ you, then part of them serving you is _knowing a lot of shit about you_, on a moment to moment basis, over a long period of time, _and then teaching that knowledge to other people so they can serve you too_.

And that’s why worrying about Privacy at Disney in a world of Magic Bands and MagicMobile and WTF is incredibly stupid.

So this really interesting thing happened when we were checking into the Poly. We were having a lot of trouble getting the gate to open. I was discouraged, thinking, gosh, I’m going to have to go by the lobby after all, when a kindly Cast Member drove up in a golf cart, chit chatted, and then I tried the band again and it worked. And then the door did more or less the same thing. R. told me later that the gate won’t open until you’ve unlocked the door (which is profoundly backwards), and I don’t know that I believe him, but I now suspect that the kindly Cast Member in the golf cart was not there by accident. I think I’d been tracked from the monorail or before as I made my way from the park to that gate, and the Cast Member was there to get a look at me, make sure I was the right person, and unlock it for me. (To be clear, I think that I was tracked from when I got within range of WDW. Disney knew where I was from when I drove up to their terminal at Port Canaveral until I got back off their boat, and they knew where I was headed when I left their terminal, so arguably, with a very few gaps, they knew where I was from December 20-December 29. The gaps were small, and the specificity on knowing where I was was very, very good.)

I’m entirely fine with that loss of privacy.

Years ago, at Bondir in Concord (still miss that place), a server bounced up to our table with a huge welcoming smile. I was like, yay, but do I know you? And she was, nope, there’s a smilie in your file.

If the loss of privacy results in smilies in my file, I’m _also_ okay with that loss of privacy. My _goal_ is to get smilies in all my files, so everyone who is in the business of providing service to people will be overjoyed to see me and I will be overjoyed at their assistance.