Last night Lauren and myself returned from our quick vacation down at Walt Disney World. It was interesting for me, as I've never been there before, but we still got bored with the entire scene after just a few days. A few of the thoughts I had while there:

Sprint Sucks: I get horrible cellphone service in NYC, and we both had terrible service down in Orlando. I think their commercials are bordering on false advertising at this point...the only way in which their all digital nationwide network is consistent is that it consistently sucks. I would call and complain about this to them, but every time I do,I end up wasting half an hour trying to avoid their automated voice system thing. I really need to start looking into an alternative provider. I'm thinking Verizon.

Queueing: I haven't been to a theme park in quite awhile, but it was amazing to me to watch the systems that Disney has in place for queue management. You can even see a difference between old and new rides as they've learned. Some of thethings I noticed were:

• Intelligent wait time signs let me know ahead of time how long I'll have to wait. It's almost a market forces approach to queuing, as the wit time increases,only those with the less elastic demand for the ride will wait for the longer times,helping to drive people to the other rides. I'm also less likely to get irritated at them if I'm forewarned about the wait. I'm sure thiis is a farily common set-up these days, but as I said,I havne't been to a park for quite a while.
• Fastpass: This is ingenious. For the more popular rides, you can get a "FastPass", about one (between all rides) per hour or so. When you get the pass, it has a pair of times printed on it between which you can return to the ride and bypass most of the line. Only a certain amount are allotted per time span, so the line is never too long. For those like us, who are less willing to wait in lines, this is great, I don't need to go on the ride now, so this allows us to do other stuff while we wait, instead of just standing there. With this we could plan a day, pick up a fastpass, and then waste time until we can either get our next one, or go on the ride or whatever. Having it as an option probably helps keep the normal line lengths down as well.
• Multiple waits: Especially on the newer rides, after you wait for half an hour to "get in", you end up in a room where a larger groups watches a video together, setting the stage for whatever the ride itself is supposed to be. On some rides, there were 2 or 3 of these interim queues before actually getting on the ride. This is really smart for two reasons. One is that once you're in that first room, you feel like you're on the ride, and therefore done waiting, when in reality, you're just being entertained while waiting. The second is that because you feel like you're on the ride already, you almost feel like the ride itself is longer. When a celebrity gives you a 4 minute spiel before the 2 minute ride, all of a sudden the ride is almost 3 times as long.

The newer rides are definitely shorter, and they all used those techniques. After a few of them, it got pretty boring, though. Once you know the system, you don't fall for it anymore. Luckily, most people (the kids) these are targeted at probably don't watch for this stuff, though.

Food Service: Disney treats all their restaurants, including the international ones at Epcot, the same way they treat their rides. "Normal" restaurants make much more money on drink than they do on food. You've already paid $50 for the privilege of being able to eat at a Disney restaurant, so they don't care about it to the same extent. They're probably far more worried about liability. Every single sit-down restaurant we went to on Disney premises, worked the same way:

• Arrive,get assigned a table and taken there by the maitre d', who gives you your menus.
• Wait from 5-10 minutes.
• As you've been waiting so long, by the time your wait(er|ress) comes by you can order your food and beverage all at once.
• Beverage appears.
• Food appears.
• Check appears.

If you're lucky, and drink fast,you might be able to order a second drink, but it seems to be discouraged. In fact, it seemed that , the wait(er|ress) always has our bill on hand ready to give us in order to get us out of there. There were no attempts to make it a "real" dining experience. We ate, at Epcot, at the German, Mexican, and UK eating establishments, and all of them worked this way,and the food at all of them was fairly mediocre. However, we're also somewhat spoiled from being in NYC, where we can get good versions of any kind of nationality's food if we want to. This was driven home when we were at the Mexican restaurant. While we re were somewhat nonplussed by Disney's version of real mexican food, the table next to us, thanked our waiter profusely for their meal. THey were from Baton Rouge, LA, and it seemed that they had never had"real" mexican food before. They were under the impression that all Mexican food was like Taco Bell/fast food fare. In this, Disney was actually doing good. Better that they should know that there's more to Mexico than Taco Bell, even if it does have to be through Disney.
The two best meals we had were at the Big River Grille and Brewing Works, who's beers were actually quite decent, and at Shula's Steakhouse. They were a nice break from contrived experiences.

Overall, it wasn't a bad trip, but I don't see us going back there any time soon. We also got to miss the blackout...which was really nice.