Annual office strip show: On again?

This week’s extra-early heat wave is being blamed on everything from man-made global warming to the election of Donald J. Trump as president.

Or, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a heat wave is just a heat wave. Whatever…

But those high-humidity 95-plus degree days made me realize that it has been several years since we asked readers to temporarily join the Fashion Police and report what colleagues are — or more often are not — wearing at the office.

The timing is good, in a twisted way, as nearby Ocean City, Maryland deals with the issue of topless bathers. Ocean City is one of the nation’s summer capitals, along with Rehoboth Beach and Bethany Beach in Delaware.

Some locals and visitors argue that family beaches shouldn’t allow topless bathing. Others argue that it discriminates against women. Letters to the editor say we’ve got to protect family values, while others say let’s move with the time. Some have even said that if the current ban is extended another season, it should apply to men too!

While mulling over whether to tackle the federal dress code (or lack thereof), an email (from 2011) popped up as if by magic. We took it as a sign that the time was ripe. The lost-in-space email was from reader Stanley Feuer, who said:

“Summer clothing could be worse, if checking it out had started earlier. Imagine America’s biggest president, William Howard Taft, in a Speedo. Now that that visual is burned in your mind, try to get rid of it. I dare you! For Taft’s dimensions, click here.“

So here we go again. It’s summertime, and it’s only gonna get hotter in most places for another 60-to-90 days. So how are things at your office? Are people showing more, even as their colleagues are enjoying it less? Are many, most or almost all of your coworkers sliding slowly back to savagery, to cave man/woman style dress? Is it about the same from summer-to-summer, or is it getting worse where you are?

“It started with casual Friday in, I think, the ’70s,” one now-retired fed told us. Men didn’t have to wear ties, and women were told they could be casual too. But it got out of hand, fast. He said, “Before long, every day was casual Friday … at least during the summer.”

He called it the Age of Spandex and reminded us that at one point, Uncle Sam had something called the “Misery Index.” It showed the levels of temperature and humidity at which supervisors could let employees, in offices without working air-conditioning, go home early.

Key employees, armed with official thermometers and humidity readers went from office to office. Each summer, tens of thousands of employees were given early release because of the heat-humidity rules. That was replaced last year by a more definitive, updated and complicated checklist from the Office of Personnel Management. 

An IRS employee in the Maryland suburbs once called the annual summer strip-down “the Ides of July and August.”

“It shouldn’t shock me, but it does shock me,” he said. “Every summer it seems to get worse. By mid-July, it is the Rocky Horror Show, sans humor or purpose. Oh, the humanity!”

So let’s take a break from alleged Russian election tampering, lawsuits, he-said-she-said congressional testimony, nocturnal executive tweets, talk of impeachment and proposals to partially dismantle your retirement package. Let’s take a quick break from gloom-and-doom stuff.

As time marches on and the heat is turned up, is it reflected in the outfits people are wearing to work?

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.