The King of Sweden has no idea what Sweden actually looks like. That is not his fault.

Years ago I worked at a construction company that held framework agreements for work in several Stockholm hospitals. The client was Locum, the Region Stockholm company that manages the region’s healthcare buildings. The agreement let them call us in for hourly work and smaller fixed-price jobs without starting a new tender every time.

A few of those jobs landed just before a royal visit.

What never changed: we only renovated the spaces the King — and sometimes the Queen — would actually walk through. We were handed a map with the exact route. Every wall and floor along that path got fresh paint. Sometimes the carpet came out too.

The rooms behind those newly painted doors could look like a time capsule from the 1950s. Nothing touched in seventy years. Those were the rooms patients lived in. The money went to the corridor the royal couple would pass in a hurry and barely see.

If someone had opened the wrong door, the illusion would have collapsed.

We made money on those jobs. That part was fine. What sat badly with all of us was the waste. In the private sector you feel how much work sits inside every tax krona. This was the opposite. Lipstick on a pig. Pretty for ten minutes. Still a pig.

I saw the same trick last night in a place I actually buy coffee. Different building. Same paint.

Have you ever been paid to make something look better than it is — and hated that you were good at it?