Casual Friday Seriousness
Having been in the IT industry for a certain period of time, I've been a passive bystander to a sizeable number of events and occurrences that baffle me beyond any level of comprehension, while providing me with ample fodder to sit and write posts about, simply because I get major kicks out of using my keyboard for purposes other than sending out official mail or writing code.
Today, while having breakfast at the office cafeteria with Chettie (which is Malayalam for 'androgynous pronoun'), we both noticed that people take friday dressing at the office too seriously.
Our office has a dress code that requires people to wear 'business casuals' from monday through thursday, with friday being the day on which employees are given leeway to dress up in 'smart casuals'. Proper guidelines have been laid down in our policies available onlinet that document what items of clothing would come under the purview of the aforesaid classifications.
Personally, I don't think too much of the dress code. I'd rather be wearing casuals, so that I don't have to change into another set when I go out in the evenings if I do, after work. It saves me a lot of trouble if I can appear slovenly in a cool way rather than to do so while attempting to dress formally.
I've been adhering to the dress code stipulated because I am a corporate sell out, and because it doesn't make sense to be noticed for the wrong reasons. There have been times when I have blatantly violated the dress code and worn jeans and walked around like I didn't care who was bothered about my attire.
However, when nobody raised any relevant objections (irrelevant objections from arbits are discounted here) over an extended period of time, some sense got drilled into my head as I voluntarily began towing the line and sticking to the dress code.
Maybe I got bored of breaking the rules, or maybe I thought this rule was too meh to be broken.
But I digress, as usual, once again!
The friday dressing down stipulation has had people dress in the most garishly freaky way possible, as if to compensate within one day for four days of repression for having had to wear formals. On certain occasions, I couldn't say for sure when I saw a bunch of people sitting and having lunch as to whether they were fellow employees or a bunch of junior artists sitting down to have a break before they resumed shooting on the sets of some B grade movie with scenes being set in a shady college.
I am not casting aspersions at the purchasing power of the individuals in question. I am merely questioning their sensibilities in a way that I can, without offending them because this is purely my space and I can say and do what I want here.
Not just the guys, even the women dress quite arbitly, leading to me coming up with a rule which would ensure that I consider only those cute women as being really cute, that don't bother going the extra mile in wearing outfits that even their engineering college would probably have been up in arms about.
In my defence, this is not an indication of me growing old (with the whole post 25 thing looming over my head), because I have been dressing pretty decently even in my hippy with ponytail phase as well to the office. (My brightest t-shirt would have to be my number 11 Jersey that I wore the day Man U had clinched the Premiership last season.)
I think its more a question of being professional and coming to the office to work rather than to put up a wardrobe display. But then again, I don't really care.
Meh.