Dress codes for Dullards

What do you wear to work? Or when you go out, say to the mall, or the local coffee shop, or the nearest internet joint? Being in a tropical country, chances are you’d wear something cool and light, and then throw on something to keep you toasty while in your air-conditioned office. Going to the mall would mean denims, round neck tee, maybe Chuck Taylors or Havies or maybe Banana Peels. A trip to the internet joint around the block could be nothing more than your favorite walking shorts, flip flops, and your breeziest tee. That’s if you’re living anywhere else other than the business district of Makati here in the Philippines.

 

The proliferation of call centers and BPOs all round the business district has brought with it a distinctive trend in clothing, as well as a different lifestyle of sorts. Not content with the norm of business casuals, some agents would rather jazz up their entire wardrobe to feature power suits, the like of which would put all the models of GQ and the cast of The Matrix to shame. Too bad most of these people don’t carry it well. Wake up call, people! Number one: there’s a reason why the Barong Tagalog was named the formal wear for Filipinos. Whatever material your barong is made out of, it is specifically designed to make you look presentable without making you feel like you’re moving around in a wearable sauna. But I digress. Of course most people would not wear any barong today unless it’s strictly signature, made by the likes of Cesar Gaupo or some other designer, mainly because security guards have now taken stock on the casual barong.

 

Of course power suits look good, they should, considering how much they can cost. This, however, does not mean that every joe schmo or jane whatshername can wear it. A toad clothed all in Prada is still a toad, and all those derogatory remarks apply. Fact is, if you are a bit on the comely side, wearing flashy clothing will only draw more attention to the fact that you are ugly. Hard fact, but true. No clothing made on this earth can make you look like the model or Hollywood star you aspire to look like. However, dressing down a bit can help.

 

My advice? Wear something that feels good on you. I have always believed in the adage that when you feel good, you look good. Feeling good while wearing expensive clothing does not count, because, let’s face it; you wear those because you want people to know you can afford to buy those clothes, while they can’t. Well, guess what? You’re still ugly. You look like you fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch with your face on the way down, although decked out all in Gucci while doing so. This is an instance where clothes do not make the man (or woman).

 

The other side of the dressing spectrum is also quite an issue with a lot of people these days. Going to the mall or local internet shop meant walking shorts, beat up household sandals, and your favorite house shirt, be it your college shirt, already yellowed with age, or the token moth-eaten shirt from 1980. Moreover, taking a bath before you go is optional, never mind the fact that you stink to the high heavens. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if these people had cars which they drove to the mall, but nooo… of course most of them have to commute to the mall, adding to their already fermenting non-bathed odor the biting smell of the road.

 

Having explored both spectrums of the clothing preferences of the modern day worker in the metro, it leaves one wondering… what the f*+%? Why can’t people learn to dress normally? Why can’t they just dress their social level, work hierarchy, etc? The answers, sadly, is because the term “normal”, as in dressing “normal” is absolutely relative. What passes off for normal for me is definitely not normal for most people working in call centers, who make it a point to devote around 70% of their income to purchasing branded clothing for themselves. What’s also borderline normal for me is way, way above for the people who go to malls looking like they just went out to take the trash out of their homes. A sad fact of the reality of democracy is learning to master the painful skill called tolerance. This world is built on the notion that each person should learn to tolerate their neighbor, no matter what denomination, sexual preference, or monetary unit they subscribe to, and so it goes with clothing. Laugh if you must at people who dress ridiculously, but make no derogatory remarks about them in public… but do so once they are out of earshot. Oh… and laugh softly if you happen to be facing them, just enough that you can deny you are laughing at them, especially if they outweigh you and they have arms the size of your flabby thighs.

Quantity versus quality

The dawn of the internet has brought with it the ultimate in quickies, fast hits, fast sales, fast porn, fast cash, fast reads, fast friends, you get the picture. With a click, you get to search for your current research, the latest movies, the next toy you’re buying, which artist or actor is banging whom, and with a little patience and know-how, someone’s social security number, their home address (if they are stupid enough to leave such information online), and their favorite stuff, it’s a stalker’s kit on a silver platter. That being said, the internet is all about speed, the more, the merrier, blah blah, yadda yadda.

 

In work, this translates into putting in more stuff than the brain can actually handle online, so that more surfers or readers will read your stuff online, be it marketing stuff, blog angst, or even social media detritus, like what people in friendster and myspace write in their accounts as blogs and pass off as “readable”. Moreover, the biggest effect this phenomena has resulted in is the flood of information you get to see on the internet. Google a word and there’s a good chance you’d get around 5 to 10 pages about it, with only the first two pages having any relevant information that you actually need, the others just being a load of SEO droppings.

 

You can search for a topic and find a multitude of articles written on the subject, and when you actually get down to downloading and reading some, you find out that all the articles you got are just bundles of cleverly (or sometimes not even) re-phrased articles vaguely dwelling on the topic you need. Look through eight or ten of the articles you downloaded and check them for content, chances are they will only have some items that have been interchanged or slightly re-worded, with no new information actually existing between them. Poor writing? Maybe. Crappy research? Good guess, but there’s a good chance the main reason for this is a burgeoning time frame to crank up as much as articles or written material the writer could, just so the all-too important deadline could be met. The result? A lot of written material with little or no real original or unique content, all of which have been SEOed the hell out of, and published on all the right submission sites. Where’s the quality? Gone with the wind, if you ask me.

 

In all the rush to meet that ever present deadline, hassled and frazzled writers everywhere are forced to come up with ridiculously copious amounts of written material, resulting in reduced (and sometimes even poor) quality in the actual results. Where’s the quality? Where’s the beef? Where’s the ooomph? Sacrificed, all in the name of meeting that deadly deadline. Does meeting the deadline justify the sacrifice of good quality for acceptable quantity? You’d be surprised at the reply of some people to this question.

 

Here’s the clincher: some people now expect writers (and sometimes even artists and designers) to come up with good sized quantity with good quality. As if bleeding writers everywhere wasn’t bad enough, huh? I’m not saying this is not achievable, my own work is testament to that, but not everyone is always at the top of their game. We all have bad moments, bad days, heck, I know someone who’s had a bad decade. Sadly, in an industry where writing is needed on a daily basis, such vestiges of humanity are not acceptable, not to the person paying for the writer’s paycheck, that is. What to do? Buckle up, suck it up, and take it on the chin.

 

Incidentally, to people out there who hire writers and bleed them dry of their writing abilities, take a moment to take into consideration that the writer you hired is human, and humans have pain thresholds, suffer fatigue, and need to goof off occasionally. Seriously, take a moment to actually read what they wrote, see if it still has quality, and then make your judgment call if whether the deadline does indeed justify the ridiculous amount of written material you demand.