> Business casual dress consists of professional and tasteful clothing
> you would wear in your workplace.
[etc. ad nauseam]
Apart from the appeals to Eli spirit, this reproduces almost word-for-word the ukase that came down when my then employer, a brontosaurian pension fund, took the world-shaking step of lifting the jacket-and-tie rule some ten years ago.
In those days I used to have to attend a regular staff meeting of some dozen very well-paid individuals. (I was the least well-paid, but I was doing pretty good for a techie. Those were the days.) This clause:
> Inappropriate attire includes but is not limited to: denim
... gave us a lot of trouble. The ontological status of denim skirts vexed one of our number very sorely, and the issue just kept coming up. I finally consulted my meeting notes and decided that over a period of about six months, we had spent somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 discussing denim skirts -- and never made up our collective mind!
I remember wondering at the time how to understand this managerial obsession with couture. How would old Karl have accounted for it? In its own small way, it's a fine case study in the profound irrationality of the enterprise, at least if you define "rationality" in a purely economic way.
-- --Michael J. Smith --mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org