We started talking about clothes, how wonderful
It is funny how dress can mark your social standing in a company/group but it can also be very deceiving especially in the IT field.
TirithRR wrote:
When I first started working at my current job, I was asked to wear button up or polo shirts. Technically I was an office employee, being an engineer and all. But after ruining every shirt I had because I was constantly working on the shop floor, inside machines, underneath things, crawling in oil filled pits, I just stopped. They haven't said anything yet and it's been about 5 years. I still put a nicer shirt on when I go out to visit a customer or something, but I wear jeans. Unless they spring the trip on me. I'll come into work wearing a tshirt and jeans and they'll tell me "Hey, wanna go visit XY today?"
This made me think of an incident some years ago now when I was working on-site. 3 of us finished for the day, drove to the hotel and walked into the hotel lift. We had been in system rooms all day and were in polo tops and pants. A man walked into the lift behind us in a fairly cheap business suit and he looked down at us before sneering and pressing his floor number. A colleague then swiped his exec floor pass and selected our floor (it was restricted access). The man looked more than a little surprised. He had judged us purely on our dress.