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dabbleswithpoisons I have struck a small blow for feminism in the workplace. I think. Anyway, it's definitely a blow for me getting my way, which is good enough for me.
It's come round again; New Uniform Ordering Time. Every so often my boss points out that we look like a bunch of hobos and makes us order new uniforms. I work for a Big Evil Faceless Corporation pharmacy chain (whose name I won't specify but it has something to do with footwear). I used to work for a nice friendly sensible small local chain, but after I'd been there about a year, Footwear ate us. There is a great deal of bitterness, and what used to be a lovely company to work for is now spectacularly shitty in a wide variety of ways, and one of the more minor ways is uniform.
The uniform of the old company was thoroughly respectable; plain black trousers, plain white shirt and a nice white drill cotton lab-coat type thing with a button front and big useful pockets, and it was the same for men and women. The new uniform is hideous and awful in every way, and the womens' version is worse by far. It manages the fairly impressive feat of being both hideous and impractical. Where the old uniform was entirely practical and professional-looking in a utilitarian kind of way, the new one seems to be designed to make the women look like trolley dollies on a budget airline. It's entirely made of polyester, so in cold weather it's all chilly and slippery and nasty, and in hot weather it's like wearing your own personal mobile sauna. The top's white, and unlike the old heavy cotton lab coats it turns a horrible dingy grey after a couple of washes, so it never looks clean. The whole thing's cleverly designed to be One Size Might Fit You If You Were Seriously Deformed; put it this way, my work tunic is a size 14. My vital stats are 33" - 28" - 32". It looks like I'm wearing a small marquee, but it still threatens to split at the armpit seams if I try to raise my arms higher than my shoulders.
And the trousers. Oh, the trousers. They are theoretically the lesser of two evils; although they can't make it compulsory they encourage women to wear the uniform skirt. This is a navy polyester pencil skirt, badly fitting, staticky and completely hobbling. The designers have never worked in a dispensary. I spend most of my day running up and down steps and ladders, or hefting and unpacking crates. What you really need is boiler suit. What you really do not need is a sodding pencil skirt. But the trousers aren't that much better. To begin with they were apparently designed in 1955; they come almost up to your armpits and seem to be designed to fit someone with hips at least twice the circumference of their waist. Again, as someone who is roughly the same shape as a bollard with limbs, this presents problems; if the damn things fit in the waist, then they're so huge everywhere else that I look like Bobo the clown and am at serious risk of becoming airborne in high winds. And NO POCKETS. It's difficult to adequately explain, if you don't work in a dispensary, how utterly critical at least one good capacious pocket is.
Anyway, my point is, this time around I put my foot down with a firm hand and demanded to be allowed to order boy's trousers instead. These are a perfectly respectable straight-legged, normal waisted, human-shaped trouser with pockets. And I got 'em! It took a bit of arguing, but I can haz boy's trousers!
Now the next step is lobbying to be allowed to wear the boy's uniform in its' entirety, which is a perfectly reasonable and dignified white cotton shirt and blue tie. I think I'll rest on my laurels for a bit before I start on that campaign, though.
It's a trivial thing, I suppose, but the thing is, it does matter. It matters in practice, because the stupidly designed uniform makes my job more difficult. I have to wear it nine hours a day, every work day, and I'm extremely uncomfortable in it, physically and mentally. And it matters in theory, because how the hell is it acceptable, after a hundred years of womens' rights campaigning, that I should have to wear a uniform that's constricting, impractical and...well, girly, in a way that I don't feel comfortable with, in order to do precisely the same job as the man next to me who is allowed to wear at least a reasonable imitation of normal clothes? Huh?
I don't think this is quite the sort of thing Emmeline Pankhurst had in mind, but what the heck. I'm proud.
It's come round again; New Uniform Ordering Time. Every so often my boss points out that we look like a bunch of hobos and makes us order new uniforms. I work for a Big Evil Faceless Corporation pharmacy chain (whose name I won't specify but it has something to do with footwear). I used to work for a nice friendly sensible small local chain, but after I'd been there about a year, Footwear ate us. There is a great deal of bitterness, and what used to be a lovely company to work for is now spectacularly shitty in a wide variety of ways, and one of the more minor ways is uniform.
The uniform of the old company was thoroughly respectable; plain black trousers, plain white shirt and a nice white drill cotton lab-coat type thing with a button front and big useful pockets, and it was the same for men and women. The new uniform is hideous and awful in every way, and the womens' version is worse by far. It manages the fairly impressive feat of being both hideous and impractical. Where the old uniform was entirely practical and professional-looking in a utilitarian kind of way, the new one seems to be designed to make the women look like trolley dollies on a budget airline. It's entirely made of polyester, so in cold weather it's all chilly and slippery and nasty, and in hot weather it's like wearing your own personal mobile sauna. The top's white, and unlike the old heavy cotton lab coats it turns a horrible dingy grey after a couple of washes, so it never looks clean. The whole thing's cleverly designed to be One Size Might Fit You If You Were Seriously Deformed; put it this way, my work tunic is a size 14. My vital stats are 33" - 28" - 32". It looks like I'm wearing a small marquee, but it still threatens to split at the armpit seams if I try to raise my arms higher than my shoulders.
And the trousers. Oh, the trousers. They are theoretically the lesser of two evils; although they can't make it compulsory they encourage women to wear the uniform skirt. This is a navy polyester pencil skirt, badly fitting, staticky and completely hobbling. The designers have never worked in a dispensary. I spend most of my day running up and down steps and ladders, or hefting and unpacking crates. What you really need is boiler suit. What you really do not need is a sodding pencil skirt. But the trousers aren't that much better. To begin with they were apparently designed in 1955; they come almost up to your armpits and seem to be designed to fit someone with hips at least twice the circumference of their waist. Again, as someone who is roughly the same shape as a bollard with limbs, this presents problems; if the damn things fit in the waist, then they're so huge everywhere else that I look like Bobo the clown and am at serious risk of becoming airborne in high winds. And NO POCKETS. It's difficult to adequately explain, if you don't work in a dispensary, how utterly critical at least one good capacious pocket is.
Anyway, my point is, this time around I put my foot down with a firm hand and demanded to be allowed to order boy's trousers instead. These are a perfectly respectable straight-legged, normal waisted, human-shaped trouser with pockets. And I got 'em! It took a bit of arguing, but I can haz boy's trousers!
Now the next step is lobbying to be allowed to wear the boy's uniform in its' entirety, which is a perfectly reasonable and dignified white cotton shirt and blue tie. I think I'll rest on my laurels for a bit before I start on that campaign, though.
It's a trivial thing, I suppose, but the thing is, it does matter. It matters in practice, because the stupidly designed uniform makes my job more difficult. I have to wear it nine hours a day, every work day, and I'm extremely uncomfortable in it, physically and mentally. And it matters in theory, because how the hell is it acceptable, after a hundred years of womens' rights campaigning, that I should have to wear a uniform that's constricting, impractical and...well, girly, in a way that I don't feel comfortable with, in order to do precisely the same job as the man next to me who is allowed to wear at least a reasonable imitation of normal clothes? Huh?
I don't think this is quite the sort of thing Emmeline Pankhurst had in mind, but what the heck. I'm proud.
