Drive-by Posting: Bow Tie Fridays
In some places, the dress code for resident physicians has been dramatically loosened from the stiffness of yesteryear. In more liberal parts of the country, male residents no longer even routinely wear ties or white coats, following the more relaxed leads of scientists, engineers, and sysadmins.
Washington University in St. Louis, however, here on the northern edge of the Bible Belt, NASCAR Country, whathaveyou, rests in a more conservative enviroment. Apparently (so the story goes) patient satisfaction surveys indicated that the people who we served were more comfortable with and expected more traditional dress codes on the part of their physicians. Long hair, polo shirts, earrings, all are frowned upon in favor of the traditional white-coat-shirt-tie uniform that doctors have been wearing since the invention of the polio vaccine and pennicillin. Meaning the range of options available for "casual" days at work are somewhat limited.
It was one afternoon declared and decided that we, the men in our intern class, should henceforth have Bow Tie Fridays, as a way of adding variation within the limits imposed by our official dress codes. Of course, the vast majority of the men in our class -- myself included -- neither owned nor knew how to tie an honest-to-goodness manual bow tie, resulting in a lot of quick after-work trips to local department stores and inpromptu lessons. And so we all showed up to Grand Rounds this morning, a platoon of gentlemen interns and our newly acquired bow ties. Much amusement was had by all. :-)
Well, it's certainly different. :-)