There was nowhere to store personal belongings during my shift, a way of discouraging me from bringing them onto the grounds. For the first time in my life, I had to leave my purse at home and stuff my driver's license and car key into a pocket of a polyester uniform. The one time I forgot and walked in with a handbag on my shoulder, I was rewarded with a search by security guards when I exited.

I could have shrugged off all of this, though, if it hadn't been for the degrading way management and guests treated me. Guests weren't just rude and demanding, a common negative in hospitality jobs anywhere. These guests had power, knew they had power, and used it as a club, with management championing their cause.

"What do you mean you don't serve Oban? You had it the other night at the golf club. Can't you go get some? Oh, is it really half a mile away? That's OK, I'm not in any hurry. I'll wait."

I'll wait -- which meant that they expected me to dash off on a mile-long round trip for a glass of their favorite scotch, while the rest of my tables suffered my absence. It didn't matter that we had two shelves of excellent single malts within reach. If they couldn't get the one they wanted, they wouldn't be happy. They were also allowed to drink without fear of ever being cut off, some becoming so falling-down drunk that they had to be hauled away to their rooms in wheelchairs.

Once a woman spent an entire night telling me that next morning she would be phoning her friend, the hotel's CEO, to have me fired because I'd dared to card her 21-year-old daughter. I had a couple who wouldn't remove their bare, dirty feet from the table where I needed to set their lunch and kept me standing there, hot plates burning my fingers, until I gave up and hauled over a second table for their food. I recall a child projectile vomiting over not just one, but two tables. Instead of apologizing, the parents complained when wait staff didn't clean up the mess immediately. (Management policy was to phone for housekeeping to deal with bodily fluids.) Twice during my tenure guests removed bandages from open sores on their bodies and thrust them into my hand, exposing me to direct contact with their blood and bits of gooey scab.

"Throw that away, won't you?" one said to me without even looking up.

Management took the-customer-is-always-right principle to new heights. It didn't matter how humiliating the task. If a guest asked it of us, we were expected to comply.

One of my least favorite memories involves a fellow waiter. He was stooped and gray, but he worked harder than anyone else in my department. I'd never seen him bothered by anything. Then on a fall afternoon a party of golfing buddies came into the resort's sports bar. From their last visit, they remembered that he knew some good stories about a famous golfer.

"Tell him to come over here," the men said. "We want him to entertain us."

They kept him standing at their table for round after round, putting on an impromptu show. Watching his grinning but humble manner and age-distorted body, I felt like I'd been thrown back hundreds of years in time to see a jester amuse a bored group of courtiers. When he finally returned to the bar his eyes spoke volumes about weariness and the fragility of personal dignity.

Like people who speak extra loudly around the blind, the privileged communicated with me as if I had the I.Q. of a canapé. Once when I used the word "synonym" in conversation with a guest, he and everyone else in the party broke out laughing. "My God, she just used a word with three syllables," his wife said.

On another night I approached a table in the dining room.

"Are you the Epsilon who's going to serve us tonight?" asked one of the men at the table.

He was making a reference to the classic novel "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley, in which a future society is divided into strict castes according to intelligence and capabilities. The names of the castes, from the top down, are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and at the absolute bottom, Epsilon, the semi-morons. He didn't think I would understand his reference, and exchanged amused glances with a friend, enjoying his joke.

"No, actually I'm an Alpha in disguise," I told him. "I'll be happy to take your order, however."

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