Emily Belsey

Last Friday, my training group was informed that we would be evaluated this week on Tuesday and Thursday.

Evaluation means we would be giving sections of the tour (assigned at random) for a group of 12 executives and department heads from Warner Brothers. Based on that evaluation, we would either be passed and move on as full-fledged tour guides, or failed and politely told to consider employment elsewhere.

So all weekend, my fellow trainees and I have been mildly stressing out about these evaluations. Our trainers have been wonderful and we all feel more than competent, but giving a tour in front of so many V.I.P.s from WB… that’s a lot of pressure. But the stress levels hadn’t risen too much in our group, because we still had a few days.

Today, after spending a morning kicking around and talking to our trainers more, Michael (another trainee) and I were called aside and told to meet with Dianna, our manager.

The meeting was to inform Michael and I that we were being evaluated TODAY in less than 3 hours. No pre-evaluation, no time to prep, but still plenty of time to panic. Because we didn’t know what section from the tour we’d be giving, we just sorta crash studied on our lunch break, and then we were off!

It went really well. I didn’t make any major goofs, I never ran out of things to say (we’re supposed to talk the whole time!), and I even made the evaluators laugh.

So I passed my evaluation! Now I’ll be doing ride-along tours with another tour guide to just polish my presentation (namely: work on projecting), and then I’m on my own!

According to my brother, I am now officially Tour Guide Barbie from Toy Story 2.

“Buh-bye, buh-bye, buh-bye now! Buh-bye, buh-bye… Are they gone yet??”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.