From, George Orwell, 'Down and Out, in London and Paris',

[Ch xii]

It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery and think that 
only a double door was between us and the dining-room. There sat the 
customers in all their splendour--spotless table-cloths, bowls of 
flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices and painted cherubim; and here, just a 
few feet away, we in our disgusting filth. For it really was disgusting 
filth. There was no time to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered 
about in a compound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and trampled 
food. A dozen waiters with their coats off, showing their sweaty armpits, 
sat at the table mixing salads and sticking their thumbs into the cream 
pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food and sweat. Everywhere in 
the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery, were squalid stores of food 
that the waiters had stolen. There were only two sinks, and no washing 
basin, and it was nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the 
water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of 
this. There were a coco-nut mat and a mirror outside the dining-room door, 
and the waiters used to preen themselves up and go in looking the picture 
of cleanliness. 

It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hotel 
dining-room. As he passes the door a sudden change comes over him. The set 
of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry and irritation have dropped 
off in an instant. He glides over the carpet, with a solemn priest-like 
air. I remember our assistant MAITRE D'HOTEL, a fiery Italian, pausing at 
the dining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottle of 
wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily the door was more 
or less soundproof): 

'TU ME FAIS--Do you call yourself a waiter, you young bastard? You a 
waiter! You're not fit to scrub floors in the brothel your mother came 
from. MAQUEREAU!' 

Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it he 
delivered a final insult in the same manner as Squire Western in TOM JONES. 

Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish in hand, 
graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowing reverently to a 
customer. And you could not help thinking, as you saw him bow and smile, 
with that benign smile of the trained waiter, that the customer was put to 
shame by having such an aristocrat to serve him. 

This washing up was a thoroughly odious job--not hard, but boring 
and silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think that some people spend 
their whole decades at such occupations. The woman whom I replaced was 
quite sixty years old, and she stood at the sink thirteen hours a day, six 
days a week, the year round; she was, in addition, horribly bullied by the 
waiters. She gave out that she had once been an actress--actually, I 
imagine, a prostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange to 
see that in spite of her age and her life she still wore a bright blonde 
wig, and darkened her eyes and painted her face like a girl of twenty. So 
apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leave one with some vitality.