When I was young, I would accompany my father on wholesale ice cream deliveries to restaurants and hotels. Some of these places were expensive and glossy, aimed at the rich senior tourist market, or the local affluent community. Yet, it soon became apparent that, no matter how successful an establishment was at impressing its guests with its décor, quality, and ambiance, it always harbored an ugly underbelly. This realization has never faded.

The knowledge that the same hotel whose lobby boasts a glass chandelier, oak reception desk, and spotless red carpet floor also has janitor closets with discolored mop sinks and a laundry room in the basement which is accumulating cobwebs behind the clothes dryers. Or: the $200 dinner restaurant whose clean and sharply dressed waitress took your order without need to write it down has a kitchen staff complete with 8 sous-chefs, all of whom have clean fingernails, but earlier in the day they received a shipment of lobster tails delivered by a scruffy man who doesn’t abide by the same hygiene standards. Also, the dish soap container underneath the three-compartment sink has a narrow streak of dried dish soap, starting at its opening and running down its side, that progressively gets longer each time the container’s sides are squeezed to make soapy water and the last bit of soap is of insufficient size to form a droplet and fall to the water so it instead, after the container has been restored to its upright position, commences a slow downward journey over the dried relics of former bits of soap.