When I started my new job a little over a year ago, I made sure to dress nicely on the first day.<\/p>\n
I wore a shirt, tie and jacket like I had at previous jobs. The jacket matched the pants I wore pretty well, so much so that people thought I had worn a suit.<\/p>\n
My boss pulled me aside later in the day, told me she appreciated that I cared so much about my appearance, but that I didn\u2019t need to dress that well each day.<\/p>\n
I inquired further and found out that I didn\u2019t even need to wear a tie each day. Better yet, I could wear jeans on Fridays as long as I didn\u2019t have to meet with anyone important.<\/p>\n
Score.<\/p>\n
I had waited so long for this. That\u2019s not a slight at my previous two jobs. The dress expectations made perfect sense. But the jobs I held in the newspaper industry before that usually allowed me to dress pretty casually.<\/p>\n
I relished the idea of just putting on a shirt and nice pants without worrying about which tie would match. I really appreciated the opportunity to throw on a pair of jeans at the end of the week before heading to work.<\/p>\n
Sure, it didn\u2019t equal the fun of wearing shorts to cover a baseball game in the summer or throwing on sweatpants to work an overnight shift in the newsroom, but I really liked this new dress code. The change made perfect sense because it continued a pattern I have witnessed my whole life.<\/p>\n
I started out by going to Catholic school where I had to wear a tie all the way through high school. Then I got to college and could wear whatever I want. That transitioned easily into my carefree newspaper days with the exception of a couple of years when I had to look the part of a professional news reporter.<\/p>\n
When I went into public relations, the ties came back out for eight years up until last December. The problem with my new situation is that I kind of miss my ties after a year.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t really miss wearing them with some of my shirts which are a little tight around the neck. But I do have some shirts which really don\u2019t look as good without a tie. I also have some pretty cool ties which I wish I could wear once in a while.<\/p>\n
Nothing about my new job prevents me from wearing a tie when I feel like it. I just never seriously consider the idea. I see the rack of ties hanging there every morning and have a fleeting idea about grabbing one, then I remember that I don\u2019t have to or something shiny catches my attention so I get ready for work like usual.<\/p>\n
With the new year under way, I might just change that. Maybe I\u2019ll throw a tie on once in a while to mix up the routine. Of course I\u2019ll have to answer questions and endure jokes for a while about why I decided to wear a tie, but that won\u2019t be too bad.<\/p>\n
I just need to remember no sweatpants at work. I miss those days, but not enough to push the envelope that far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I started my new job a little over a year ago, I made sure to dress nicely on the first day. I wore a shirt, tie and jacket like I had at previous jobs. The jacket matched the pants…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-clothing","category-columns","wpcat-71-id","wpcat-3-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=822"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":823,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822\/revisions\/823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}