Wearing Sweatpants On The Job: A Nevin Barich Blog Experience

Earlier this week, I woke up with a nasty sore throat and was forced to work from home. Working from home is much different from working in the office. It's quieter, sometimes harder to get motivated, even borderline lonely.

But at least I got to wear sweatpants!! :-)

If you're like me, you work in an office that forces you to wear bottom-half attire featuring a fastening button. Whether it's jeans, dress pants or skirts (do skirts have fastening buttons? ???), you have to put something on underneath your belly button that doesn't include an elastic waist.

And personally, I think that's just plain wrong.

Working from home the other day really opened my eyes. Even though I was sick, tired and every inch of me preferred to crawl back into bed and wait for sedatives to kick in, I found myself being extremely productive. Big tasks, little tasks, out-of-the-blue tasks, it didn't matter. Here I was, sucking cough drops by the handful, blowing through my work like wind through a desert.

And I owe it all to my sweatpants with holes in my pockets.

You see, I was comfortable. I'm not a big guy, but let's face it: Big or small, we all feel restricted in work pants. In work pants, it's hard to move your legs in a sitting position. In sweatpants, your legs sway like a deer running the woods. In work pants, it's a littler harder to "sit down and get up, sit down and get up." In sweatpants, you can practically jump from one position to the other. In work pants, you're sucking in your gut. In sweatpants, your belly is exhaling like it's never exhaled before.

So I ask: What is wrong with wearing sweatpants to work? They're comfortable, you're more productive in them, and let's be honest: Are we really so vain? When did we as a society suddenly decide that being comfortable in the workplace was taboo? Who are we really trying to impress? If everyone wore sweatpants, you wouldn't have to impress anybody!!

So I'd like now to speak directly to the CEOs and executives and vice presidents and any other "dress code decision making" people who read this blog and say this:

Let your employees wear sweatpants to the office. Schedule a companywide meeting and announce to everyone that you're removing the shackles known as slacks and are encourgaing -- even demanding -- that everyone jump on the sweatpants bandwagon. Wear them yourself -- set an example -- and once others follow your lead, you will see productivity rise, revenue increase, and company morale boosted.

And if the sweatpants have holes in them, like mine do, you'll also see boxer shorts with puppy dogs on them.

A necessary sacrifice...for the sake of progress.

:-)

And now for this week's:

SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE

I love it when I can give a SOTA that's a little more personal. :-) The Cal State Northridge (CSUN) men's basketball team is just one win away from making the NCAA tournament!! Little CSUN, my alma mater, with a basketball "stadium" that's a glorified high school gym and a team roster filled with names you never heard of and probably will never hear of again, is just one game away from the promised land.

March Madness has officially begun. :-)