Dress for the Job You Want
DRESS FOR THE JOB YOU WANT – October 17, 2024 – Hollywood, California, USA
“Don’t dress for the job you have, dress for the job you want!” – Any suit salesman
Javier had a history of discontent. He constantly questioned his role and the work conditions in his company’s accounting department. He shared cubicle space with three accounting colleagues, Leo, Van, and Dillon and peppered them with complaints and proposals.
“When are they going to do something about these chairs, and this software, and the climbing vines I asked for?”
“We should ask for higher cubicle walls.”
“We should move to four-day work weeks.”
Leo, Van, and Dillon learned not to take Javier too seriously. His attention always switched to a new demand before any of his old ones were met. When he reached a phase of questioning his personal career choices, his workmates mostly let him talk to himself
“Do you ever tell people what you do for work?” Javier asked Leo.
“Not really,” Leo replied with a shoulder shrug.
“When I tell people what I do, it’s hard to describe. Even embarrassing. Reconciling invoices and expense reports. Do you think any little kid wants to grow up to do that?”
Leo slowly shook his head as he checked invoices on his computer screen.
“I’m wasting my life,” Javier continued. “No one respects me. When I walk down the street, I’m invisible. When I was younger, I had infinite potential. I could have been anything I wanted. If only I could go back in time.”
During this period of self-loathing, Javier jealously admired the businesses he passed as he biked to work. He was sure the people inside were doing more satisfying jobs than his. Sometimes he stopped to investigate businesses that looked especially interesting. One of his visits included a large costume shop that occupied half a block. He walked into the cramped storefront lobby and happened to find an employee with purple hair and wearing a Metallica T-shirt.
“What do you guys do here?” Javier asked in innocent wonder.
The purple-haired girl looked back at him like he was purposely being a nuisance. “Like our sign says, we rent costumes. Mostly for TV and movie productions.”
“What kind of costumes?”
“Anything and everything.”
“Can anybody rent them?”
The purple-haired girl sighed. “Yeah, but these aren’t cheap, throwaway costumes you might get for Halloween. These are authentic and priced accordingly.”
The costume shop gave Javier a new and ingenious idea. If he rented uniforms worn by people with recognizable professions, he would know what it felt like to have a real career. If he liked the feeling, he was still young enough to make a change, even if it meant going to school for training. He told his coworkers about the experiment.
“I like to think of it as a trial run. I would walk a mile in different shoes and see what I thought.”
“You’re going to rent a costume and wear it all day long?” Van asked in response.
“That’s right.”
“You should probably bring a change of clothes to work because I don’t think you’ll last the whole day. If you try it at all.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You say you’re going to try a lot of stuff. But you never do.”
Javier scowled with new determination. “Oh yeah? I’ll show you. I’ll do it for a whole week.”
To show he was serious, Javier asked his boss for permission to wear costumes in the office. The normal dress code was fairly casual, so Javier did not expect any resistance. He hid the true reason behind his wardrobe switch behind the excuse of preparing for Halloween.
“I want to try out some different looks this year before I commit to anything,” Javier explained.
“Nothing too crazy, I hope,” his boss replied nonchalantly
“Nah, just classic stuff. It’ll look like I’m a visitor for career day.”
“Fine with me. Try not to distract the people on your floor.”
Over the weekend, Javier returned to the costume shop and found a different girl working in the lobby. She wore overalls and her hair in pigtails. When Javier explained what he was looking for, she acted interested in the experiment.
“I want five different looks. Five different careers so I can see people’s reactions.”
“Then you definitely want one to be a cop uniform,” the pigtail girl immediately replied. “Everybody’s going to react to that. And maybe you want something they won’t notice so much, like a construction worker.”
“And I want something that makes me look smart.”
“I’d go with a doctor. Maybe a surgeon wearing scrubs.”
With the costume girl’s help, Javier narrowed his choices to a police uniform, construction gear, surgeon scrubs, an airline pilot’s uniform, and a lifeguard outfit. He paid a deposit for all five ensembles and proudly took them home. After trying them on, he decided to start boldly on Monday morning. He dressed in the cop costume.
Javier did not have a fake gun, but the black shirt, pants, and hat looked convincing. He wore a gold metallic badge with comically large letters spelling out POLICE. He completed the look with a plastic radio and nightstick. He grabbed his bike and walked it to the street in front of his apartment.
As he crossed the sidewalk, he heard a teenage voice behind him call, “Smells like bacon!”
Javier turned to see three sniggering boys laughing. “You should have more respect for the law!” Javier shouted.
The boys made oinking noises and hurried away. Other passersby looked at Javier like he should do something. Instead, he got on his bike and pedaled toward his job. As he passed pedestrians and cars parked at intersections, he saw countless defensive stares. Everyone around him seemed to think they were on the verge of being arrested.
When Javier arrived at his office building, he made his usual stop at the coffee cart stationed outside. Yvonne, the woman who ran the cart, knew him well. Her heavily wrinkled face stared up at him and asked, “So you’re a policeman now?”
“It’s just a costume.”
Yvonne eyed him suspiciously. “I’m not doing anything wrong. I’ve had this cart for years. Why do you want to scare people?”
Javier grabbed his usual order and walked up to his floor. Leo, Van, and Dillon laughed when they saw him.
“Looks like we’ve got a 10-19 in progress,” Dillon said with a smirk. “Impersonating an officer.”
“Where’s your gun?” Leo asked. “How you gonna shoot somebody?”
“Ha ha. You obviously have no respect for authority. If I was a real cop, you’d all be in handcuffs.”
The teasing continued through the morning and when they walked to their usual lunch spot at an outdoor food court. The four coworkers sat at the same table eating falafels when a kid in a hoodie ran up to Javier and yelled that someone stole his scooter.
“I can’t help you. I’m not a real cop,” Javier answered.
“Then why are you dressed like one?”
“It’s a social experiment.”
“You’re just too lazy to help. C’mon, do something.”
“Yeah, do something,” Dillon added. “Make a citizen’s arrest.”
Javier yelled that he was powerless and begged to be left alone. He spent the rest of the day attempting to look inconspicuous until he stopped at a supermarket on his way home. He quickly grabbed a rotisserie chicken and stood in the express checkout lane. The person in front of him nervously said, “I only have ten items, officer. It might look like more, but a lot of them are packaged together.”
“Okay with me,” Javier replied. He could not wait to get home and out of the uniform.
He had already paid for the five costumes, so he had to continue his experiment, but he was ready to impersonate someone with less authority. On Tuesday morning he put on construction worker gear consisting of thick pants, a neon yellow vest, and a hard hat.
“Now people will see me as down to earth,” Javier said to himself as he admired the outfit. “Just a guy making an honest living with his muscles and sweat.”
As he rode his bike down the street, few people noticed except for one woman who jumped in front of her young daughter as if Javier was going to whistle and yell something crude.
“What are you supposed to be today?” Yvonne asked at the coffee cart.
“A construction worker. Can’t you tell?”
“Your hands are too soft for a construction worker. You have office hands.”
Leo, Van, and Dillon enjoyed asking Javier to pass them shovels and staple guns. They threw balled up paper at his hard hat. When everyone went to lunch, one of the food court janitors thought Javier might be headed for the bathroom.
“Bathrooms are for customers only,” the janitor snapped.
“I am a customer. And I don’t need the bathroom.”
“You construction guys are always trying to use our bathroom. Use the portable toilet at your construction site.”
Javier wanted to claim he was a hard-working guy like the janitor and simply looking to get some lunch. Instead, he walked away with his mouth shut. That evening, he made another stop at the supermarket and noticed how other customers avoided standing in his line.
“I don’t smell,” Javier muttered to himself. “I only look like I use my muscles and sweat. I have office hands. I smell like office.”
When Javier put on his Wednesday costume, he was sure he would finally get the proper respect he craved. His surgical scrubs came with a head covering, mask, and stethoscope to wear around his neck. “Looks like I’m on my way to the hospital,” Javier said to himself.
When he stopped at a crosswalk on his bike, he heard a woman say to her attractive young friend, “Looks like a rich young doctor. You should get his number.”
Javier smiled and wondered how long it would take to get through medical school. He reached the coffee cart and Yvonne quickly pulled him down to earth.
“Are those clothes clean? I don’t want to catch anything. I hate when medical people wear their bloody clothes around.”
“They’re clean! They’ve never been in a hospital,” Javier replied defensively.
When he arrived in his cubicle, Leo, Van, and Dillon had fun looking up symptoms for obscure diseases and challenging Javier to identify them.
“You can’t be a believable doctor unless you have all this memorized,” Dillon said after Javier grew tired of guessing. “And by the way, my disease was scurvy. Even a non-doctor should know that.”
While he ate lunch, two different customers approached Javier for a consultation. One asked about a shoulder injury and the other had something wrong with their tongue.
“We gotta get out of here,” Javier said to Leo, Van, and Dillon. “If someone collapses with a heart attack, they’re going to expect me to do CPR.”
The others agreed that would not be good for anyone and finished their lunch hour back in their office.
Javier had two more careers to experience, and he was hopeful the next one would provide the right amount of respect and intimidation. When he put on his airline pilot’s coat and hat, he told himself he looked like he was in the military. He liked the gold stripes on his sleeves, the gold wings on his pocket, and the gold insignia on his short-brimmed hat. When people saw him, they would surely think he was ready to fly off to some exotic destination.
“Now you’re a pilot, huh?” Yvonne said at the coffee cart after one look. “What airline do you work for?”
“Could be any of them. One that flies all over the world.”
“It better not be Southwest. I got stranded in El Paso for three days because of them.”
“Okay, it’s not Southwest.”
“I’ll take some extra frequent flier miles if you’ve got them. Whatever airline.”
The others in the accounting department were eager to point out that airline pilots were not that different than bus drivers, but with classier uniforms.
“I think bus drivers do more work,” Leo concluded in a teasing voice. “They can’t take their hands off the wheel. These days, planes mostly fly themselves.”
When Javier ordered lunch, he thought the cute girl behind the counter was flirting with him after admiring his uniform. He misinterpreted her smile.
“Yeah, my dad used to be a pilot, but he got out of it,” the girl explained. “Now he sits behind a desk doing something on a computer.”
By Friday, Javier had to admit that his career exploration was mostly disappointing, but he had one more costume to go. He slipped into his red lifeguard shorts and tight-fitting T-shirt. He dropped a whistle around his neck and grabbed the life-saving flotation device that came with his rental.
“Don’t you have to be in better shape to be a lifeguard?” Yvonne asked at the coffee cart. “Can you swim across a pool?”
Javier spent the rest of the day worrying about how he looked in a swimsuit. He asked Leo to pick him up something from the food court and bring it back to the office.
After quitting time, Javier was the only one left in the accounting cubicles. His boss wandered past and had to comment on his costume.
“I’ve noticed you wearing your outfits around. Did you decide on anything for Halloween?”
Javier sounded philosophical with his reply. “You know, I’ve kind of learned I don’t want something that’s going to stick out too much or make you into a stereotype. Maybe I want to look more anonymous.”
“Then you should dress up like an accountant. You could carry some fake files around. And a tax code book.”
Javier sighed for an uncomfortably long time. Before his boss could ask if anything was wrong, Javier said, “You know, I think for Halloween I should find a costume that has nothing to do with jobs. Just a plain old monster.”
“Can’t go wrong as a vampire. I can lend you my Dracula cape,” his boss replied helpfully.
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