By June Mathews
If going to work in a downtown office three days a week has done anything good for me – besides give me a regular paycheck and a fabulous new batch of work friends – it’s forced me to be less of a slob for three days a week.
Now I’ve always loved working at home. Not only is the 10-second commute from bedroom to office much less stressful and infinitely safer than the half hour road race from Trussville to downtown Birmingham, I’m allowed to dress as comfortably as I please. And there’s nothing I like more than comfortable clothing. But to be perfectly honest, one reason I accepted the part-time job with a local law firm a couple months ago was that I knew it was past time for a push in a less slovenly direction.
Jeans or sweatpants paired with T-shirts (long- or short-sleeved, depending on the season) had become my daily attire, and when I stopped caring whether or not my clothes were a wrinkled mess, I figured an up-close-and-personal encounter with the Fashion Police was in my future. Either that or some well-meaning friend would write a convincing enough letter to one of those “fashion ambush” reality shows, and cameras would show up on my doorstep instead.
But I didn’t care. I’d fallen into an easy rut and was content to stay there and wallow awhile. Besides, who irons T-shirts? Wear them a while, and the wrinkles will eventually fall out – or most of them at any rate. And even if they don’t, not ironing conserves electricity, as well as effort.
These days, though, I’m out of bed at 6:15 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, pawing through the closet for something decent to wear, wondering if that black sweater I bought at an end-of-season sale in 2005 might still fit without clinging to every extra pound (it doesn’t) or if the dressy blue blouse and baggy gray Dockers might possibly look good together (they don’t) or if God would really strike me dead were I to wear a horizontally striped top (according to my mother, He would).
But for all the angst of getting appropriately dressed and out the door in time to drive 17 miles through rush hour traffic and be sitting at my desk by 8 a.m., cleaning up my style act a bit has done me good.
Yeah, buying new clothes has kind of blown the budget – I mean, you can’t beat the price of free T-shirts for working at last year’s City Fest or helping stuff bags for the library’s summer reading program (Hmmm… if I worked for them, were they really free?). But since it’s only been a couple years since I last worked in an office, I’ve been able to mix-and-match a lot of old pieces with new ones and thus avoid totally breaking the bank.
And sadly, my iron and I are done with conserving the energy we saved during my sojourn in the Land of the Chronically Crumpled.
But I’ve got to admit that after working at home alone for a while, there’s something refreshing about donning my public persona three days a week and heading to an office with my name on the door and everything.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love my home office and the freedoms it allows. But I also love the professional and social aspects of working at the firm. And for me, being able to split my work week between the two venues is ideal. Not only do I get to dress up and be a girly-girl three days a week, I also get to regularly revisit the Land of the Chronically Crumpled without danger of wallowing there for very long.
I think that’s what you’d call “the best of both worlds,” and for me it works out well. Now if I could only twitch my nose and be at my downtown office as quickly as I can my home office, I’d really have it made.
Email June Mathews at jmathews120@charter.net.