03 May 2008

Dressing Up For Business Made Simple

"Clothes make the man." And now I've even experienced it firsthand.

New dress code for The Happy Employee
I've been wearing a suit (including tie) for the last three weeks. And here are examples of how people reacted:
  • A friend of mine almost choked from laughing too hard when he saw me (too bad the Stupid Kid didn't laugh harder...).
  • On two separate occasions people apologized several times for something I thought wasn't even worth mentioning (this never happened before).
  • And my favorite: The guy at the gas station always called me "buddy", now he calls me "Sir".
Business clothes have the advantage that, at least for men, the choices are quite restricted. Therefore you don't have to think too hard about what to wear. On the other hand good quality clothes can be quite expensive.

What you need to keep the thinking and spending to a minimum
  • 2 pair of black shoes
  • 2 black suits
  • 5 white shirts
  • 10 ties
This way you will always have spare clothes. Even if you don't manage to wash them every week, you could still wear each shirt twice (unless it's very hot, you're sweating a lot, etc.).

Only one decision to make in the morning
It's simple: "which tie should I wear today?" After all, any tie will match the rest of your black and white clothes anyway.

Tie Storage System
If this is still too much effort, store your ties in a row. Then select each morning the first one on the right and put it back on the far left in the evening. For more variation without too much additional effort, you can randomize the order of the first five ties from the right each Sunday evening.

Even Blacker
And yes, you could also decide to use black ties only, but your boss and co-workers might see this as laziness and you would certainly become the target of many Blues Brothers and Men In Black jokes.

Link
For more sophisticated information on dress codes check out Dresscode Guide.
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're fooling us. You never wore a suit for more than one day in a row (sic!).

Happy Employee said...

Actually, never for more than 2-3 hours in a row.

Tempora quid faciunt!