More Cuts at ESPN

I knew he announced. Didn't realize he stepped back in.

 

We were there a year ago, mid-week, off-season. The merch stores were slammed even after 10 pm on a Monday.

Another thing that stood out was how talented everyone serving us was. The parking lot attendant at Magic kingdom was freestyle rapping to tell us how to get back to our car. Every waiter was funny, friendly and on point. There were more skilled dancers and actors and singers than you could ever count. It felt like everyone with any spark of charisma from small towns around the world had come here to work.

And that was just the little parts we saw. All the other off-site huge hotels and restaurants need at least a few people who aren’t total dipshits.

The scale of it all is incomprehensible. Surely it’s too big to fail from anything short of a comet — not a measly asteroid — hitting Florida. It’ll be fascinating to see how it comes back.

 

If the Mouse sneezes, everybody in central Florida gets the chills. After canker and widespread frost killed off most of the citrus crop in the 1970s, Orlando pushed all its chips into tourism, and basically rides the boom or bust rollercoaster depending on how much Magic the Kingdom provides. Here are the top 10 employers:

1. Walt Disney World
2. Orange County Public Schools
3. State of Florida Government
4. Adventist Health System
5. Florida Hospital
6. Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
7. Orlando Regional Healthcare System
8. Universal Studios Orlando
9. Kaiser Foundation Hospital
10. Publix Supermarkets, Inc.

 

Either Disney was poorly operated or your editor was blowing smoke up your ass. If your position was making money, you would have been kept. The parks should not have been or were not propping up ESPN.com.

 

Florida Hospital is part of the Adventist Health System. It's the main hub.

 

Yep, Orlando has tourists and old people. Lots of both. Stands to reason hospitals account for the other 25 percent of the jobs in town.

 

When I worked for a publishing division of Disney, they held one of the East Coast company picnics at a day camp in north Jersey. It was the best-organized event I have ever attended, 3,000 people ands zero lines for food. We got a picture with Winnie thew Pooh, met a lot of other cast members from print, radio and TV. At the end, Iger and Willow landed in a helicopter and he told us what a great job we were doing. We also got passes to the theme parks each year. Seems like a hundred years ago...

 

We were there last summer for about nine days (which, we agreed upon arriving home, was at least three days too long for August). It's crazy to look at the pictures now and see wall-to-wall people and how unimaginable that will be for the rest of time. It's also nuts to think about how I was laid low by a fever for a few days after getting back and how I just shrugged it off as a badge of honor for traveling.

 

I got really sick after going to see the Christmas decorations at a packed Disney Springs last November. Took me five weeks to get over "severe sinusitis," which they had to treat with a steroid. My doctor still doesn't know what it really was.

Have no interest in ever getting in a crowd of people like that again.

 

Train ride in India is the scariest.



Not near that outlandish but it was a complete joke how many people were on the thing.
And driving there is like the asteroid scene in Star Wars.

 

‘Significant’ layoffs at ESPN coming as soon as Thursday