Not all guests were unpleasant or tactless. In fact, the nicer ones outnumbered the snobbish and mean, but they didn't make up for the other side of the equation, management.

Listening to my fellow employees I received the distinct impression that the hotel had once been a desirable place to work. "People used to fight to get in here," I was told one evening when the waiters felt like talking. It was only in recent years that they'd witnessed deterioration in their working environment and incomes. Most employees equated these changes with the arrival of a new corporate team that swooped in to begin subdividing vast acres of previously unspoiled land belonging to the resort. My co-workers saw the resort become a selling tool for $300 million in land-sales profits, instead of being a destination in and of itself. Their biggest concern was that once every last lot was gone, the resort might be sold off and the hotel part of it shut down for several months, thus ending their union contracts.

"Then they'll reopen it under a new name and hire some of us back at half what they pay now," ran a common refrain.

Management did nothing to dispel their worries, instead intensifying them by adopting further policy changes to maximize profit and productivity at the expense of the lower ranks.

"It used to be we made money from ..." or "They didn't used to make us do ..." or "Well, looks like we won't be able to do that anymore," were phrases I often heard from my co-workers. Tipping opportunities and benefits began to erode as management retooled departments to shift money that hourly workers would have earned into cost savings and new revenue streams for the hotel.

In my department a new bar was built that could be serviced by two waiters, one acting as bartender. At first the waiters were excited by the hotel's spin on it, and I was pleased, too, as the new bar had created the job I now had.

"An extra bar means extra tips for you to split on payday," management told us.

Then two months later came the bad news. Since just after Prohibition, the lounge had always employed a year-round staff of waiters. Some had been there for 30 years or more and were favorites with the guests. Now the lounge would close for six months of the year, and most of the staff would be laid off, because the new bar could serve just as many during that time with only one waiter and one bartender.

Cost efficient, definitely, yet I dreaded those 11- to 12-hour shifts at the new bar. I was never given more than one 10-minute break per day and even that was pointless. There was no break area. To sit down anywhere in the hotel's public areas, even in civilian clothes on days off, risked a write-up in your employee jacket. On slow days, when I wasn't running back and forth through three grand lobbies, across two sweeping terraces, a piano room, game room, and multiple reading parlors, as the only person to serve a waitstation the size of a football field, I was expected to always be in guest view, standing at Buckingham-guard attention for hours. Before coming to the resort I'd never thought that I would look forward to using a restroom just for the chance it afforded me to sit down. (Management later reconsidered its cost-cutting plan when it met with mixed results; it changed the number of months the lounge would be closed from six to five and agreed to open it up on the busiest weekends, giving workers back some of the hours they had lost.)

I was amazed at the arrogance of the corporation when it came to employee relations. Most supervisors used intimidation as their principal management tool. I felt especially sorry for the shuttle-bus drivers who routinely worked 16-hour days with no break. If they ran inside to use the bathroom, a supervisor would usually be there to question what they were doing.

The drivers worked such long hours because not long after I started all nonmanagement employees were banned from parking anywhere on the resort's thousands of acres. They were to be bused in from a newly built lot near downtown. Whereas before, local workers could count on a five-minute commute door to door, they were now required to spend 40 minutes to an hour of unpaid time waiting for and riding a shuttle bus onto and off the property. No one explained why. Rumors circulated that it was because the corporation wanted to develop our former parking lots behind the laundry into luxury homes, but in the absence of an explanation the message sent was that same old refrain: Sorry, you're not good enough to drive onto hotel property.

I don't consider myself a liberal, and in fact I was raised as a conservative. But it doesn't take the countless studies that have been completed in recent years to demonstrate to me that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening as the ground falls out from under the middle class. All I needed was six months on the receiving end. Of the 2.3 million workers who have lost their white-collar paychecks over the last three years due to outsourcing, productivity gains and, as some pundits claim, a shortage of start-up capital, I'm certain many have learned the same demeaning lesson I did when forced downward by the scarcity of quality jobs.

I wonder how many of us imagined when we left school to embark on the bright and shining futures heralded by our graduation ceremonies that we would be staring down our 30s, 40s and 50s as minimum-wage earners?

Thankfully I've moved on to more rewarding and pleasant work, but my season among the chronically underemployed provided me with a stark reality check. Don't fool yourself. Even winners are vulnerable in today's job market.

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