Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Business attire, according to our parents, meant pressed pants, a clean shirt, and heaven almighty possibly a necktie, but these days the sartorial landscape is different. More relaxed. Less Werther’s Originals. I’ve always been in online advertising, so I imagine my perspective is skewed. It’s a young industry powered by young people who, at the helm of something that is itself being shaped, are trying to create a kind of corporate counterculture, a response to the old guard.
Casual dress is part of this push, which is why I roll into work most days looking like I fell out of a ska concert. I’m not saying this is ideal, of course, only that it’s permissible. There are times, however, when the fancy threads are called for, and lately my standard operating procedure has been tested to the limits.
I’ve only recently purchased an iron, and prior to acquiring this marvelous device I played a dangerous game of probabilities. Tossing ten shirts into the laundry room–specifically into the spooky machines that reside there–would normally result in the emergence of at least one unwrinkled shirt. But three weeks ago, a terrible revelation came to me as I looked at my wardrobe: all the shirts were wrinkled.
The dice rolled me, you could say, so I did what any reasonable bachelor would do. I went out and bought a new shirt. And then, when cursed fortune screwed me again a day later, I bought another one. Two days later, caught in a strange logic that valued expanding my shirt count rather than steaming it, I purchased another two.
Eventually I came to my senses and procured an iron, and after glancing at my kitchen counter, the floor, a few walls, a door, and then the kitchen counter again, I also pulled the trigger on an ironing board. I’ll tell you this: I should’ve stuck to my shirtstravaganza. I sunk half an hour into the same goddamn shirt, and I had de-wrinkled it with all the effectiveness of a truck full of prunes colliding furiously into a nursing home. I just wish they made ironing boards shaped like shirts, you know? Oh, snap. I just figured out early retirement.