After washing out of grad school, my first job was a temp gig with SONAT – the parent of Southern Natural Gas, a huge energy concern throughout the South, headquartered in Birmingham. Very old, very traditional, very stodgy. Casual Fridays meant you could go without a tie. So there I was, May-June-July, hottest summer in years, wearing a shirt and tie and getting out of the car at 7:45 to go to work when it was already 78 degrees.
When I started at NG, we were still shirt-and-tie although Fridays were wide open – jeans, sneaks, whatever you had was fine. There was an abortive attempt at doing “wacky tie Thursday” but it never really took. I don’t know when the policy changed exactly – as late as spring 1998 there are pics of me at my desk, shirt and tie, no goatee – but by the end of the year we were pretty much down to Casual Monday, Casual Tuesday, Very Casual Wednesday, Extremely Casual Thursday and Just Don’t Come In Butt Naked Friday. Except for a couple of attempts to impress the girls in NG Channels International with suits on going-out nights, that was it for the ties.
The next big wardrobe shift came with the heat of summer in 2001. At some point, I quit wearing jeans between April and October, and largely switched to cords December through March. Summer meant khakis with a steady stream of black Hawaiian shirt, black mambo shirt, black bowling shirt, etc etc; winter meant an endless array of black polo shirts over the cords topped with the black leather car coat. You had to be kitted out for 95 degrees and Code Red conditions in August and 10 degrees and blizzard snow in February.
That’s not the case out here. Conditions in Silly Con Valley are best described as “DC in early April” for the winter months and “DC in late April” for everything else, and even the occasional high-90s heat wave doesn’t come with the caliber of humidity you get down South. And my first year and a half was spent basically dockwalloping, so everything was steel-toes, dirty jeans, and an endless array of T-shirts. Desk duty allowed me to clean up the jeans and find a slightly nicer shirt, but car commuting made outerwear less of a consideration. I somehow found myself buying a waterproof-suded jean jacket, which I almost never have cause to wear, and a couple of rain shells which are generally all you need unless the temps are dropping below 55 or so.
Having gone back to train commutes in the last two years has complicated matters. Now I definitely need waterproofing in some form. And since my office goes around with me in a Timbuk2 backpack, something like a leather coat of any kind is impractical as the pack is sure to ruin it. Jeans are damn near the only thing I wear ever, although apparently T-shirts are a no-no if there’s any chance at all you might get sent to a Dean’s office to fix something, so I’m back on an endless supply of solid-color sport shirts.
I still wear the Docs almost every day, obviously, but the steel-toes are too heavy to commute with unless you’re driving. =)
There was no point to all this. I just couldn’t come up with anything else today and I had to kill a few hundred words somehow.