Tuesday, August 02, 2005

absurdity of work(wear)

Why must companies dictate what their staff wear to work? What is the purpose of it?

We know that back in school, we were made to wear the cloned clothes (despite their ugly colour schemes and designs) for the sake of "unity" and uniformity. So why the need to adhere to dressing rules at work?

If I work as a sales or a high-ranking management staff who meets clients on a day-to-day basis, fine. I would need to upkeep the image of the company, and thus requiring me to dress formally and decently. But what if I'm just a lowly clerk or a call centre operator? I would never need to meet any clients, and the only interaction I would have with them would be through telephone, fax or emails. So why the need to conform to a dress code then?

I feel extremely disgruntled by the fact that even as a lowly $5.50 per hour temporary admin assistant in a small local electronics company, I still have to "dress for the occassion". What the fuck for? A month later, once my temp assignment is over, you guys won't even remember my name. So what kind of appearance do I need to keep up?

I don't get to pick up the phone, so nobody would even know that there's a Shelly who works here. I am almost dispensable, since I am only being hired as a temp. So why, why fucking why, control what I wear?

Naturally the rules are simple and pretty idiot-proof. No bikinis, no shorts, no sportsbras. Nothing that you usually wear around the house. No plunging necklines, no 7-inch miniskirts, no midriff-baring tops. Leave those skimpy pieces for the clubs. So why the FUCK can't I wear jeans??

Pui. It just makes my blood boil thinking about what to wear to work tomorrow.

16 months of being away from the working world has left me with nothing "suitable" to rot in the office with. Yes. Rot. Nobody really gives me any work to do around there, so I end up chatting with Hubs through MSN. How cool is that? A company that hires you at $5.50 per hour, just to go in from 8.30am to 6pm every weekday to chat on MSN. Woohoo!

So what the hell do I actually do there? Random things. They'll make me check on the status of orders. Or pass me a few orders to process by issuing invoices, purchase orders and delivery orders. Maybe if I'm really good, they'll give me something challenging like allocating stock and doing something called "charge out" where you consolidate some orders together (by some sort of order) to form packing lists for the store guys. I like doing that quite a bit.

Oh. And I'm currently the designated fax girl. I work with a fax machine so ancient, it doesn't even support multiple page loads. You start to build a really good relationship with it when you stand there for 30 minutes loading in the faxes page by page by page. If it likes you, it tries not to jam up the paper.

Well, so that's that. I'm gonna be there in that stinky industrial building until 26 August. All for the sake of having something to do that actually earns (and not wastes) money. I feel like I'm selling my soul. I swear I am NOT going to work in anywhere that requires me to conform to any redundant dress codes after this. *folds arms indignantly*