Young professionals dressed smartly are out early on a Saturday morning. Early for them, I expect, given their grimaces whenever they stop chatting with each other and have a moment to feel the pain of last night’s excesses.

As they power walk up the Foggy Bottom metro station escalator, the exchange of air charging down into the tunnels below brings with it the scent of their perfume and shampoo.

They were off early to a first installment in a long-running series of professional development and special interest “brunches,” always to be prefixed by words like “national” and “coalition” or “foundation.”

On the Metro later, the smell of shampoo again. Perhaps this is the smell of Spring on the weekend in Washington: freshly scrubbed people coming out of their suburban caves and cubicles.

A mother says to another “I hope it is safe to walk around down there,” as her son unsteadily staggers about the moving train car. They get off at the Smithsonian stop on the National Mall — it’s mid-morning.

Tourists from West Virginia snicker at wonks and the otherwise overworked pecking away at their Blackberries and iPhones.

At 11AM in the upstairs lounge of the Starbucks on Capitol Hill the library-like atmosphere is populated by white people on white MacBooks. Except for the one black employee eating a breakfast before her shift. A large breakfast contained in two large foam cartons.

The smell is decidedly un-Starbucks like, and somewhat ironic given that Starbucks is about to implement a ban on their own breakfast sandwiches for the very reason of the smell overpowering their desired olfactory branding. Eventually, she closes up her food and proceeds to noisily blow her nose, twisting pieces of napkin and sticking it up her nose. I remember seeing my father doing the same thing.

It may seem crude and unpolished here on Capitol Hill, but I’m sure the guy with the military contractor badge was up to something cruder via a VPN connection to whatever Pentagon network.