One summer during college I walked in off the street to apply for a job at what I took to be a bar but in fact was a strip joint. I do not have the requisite equipment or general air of a stripper, and the manager must have suspected that I was a naive ding-dong but did not know exactly what to say. I was getting that same sort of look in the smoking room. I told the smokers I was writing an article about airport smoking rooms. Amazingly, no one questioned this.
People never do.
People are great. I looked around. You could write your name in the haze over our heads. The ashtrays had no sand, and the vent on the ceiling was hairy with dust. It was hard to imagine what bad was.