The dress patterns of nurses

I was recently reading an old blog of Kerri's friend Cassie who experienced the joy of grown adults in holiday sweaters. Here's a little sample from her post "Was the message somehow passed on to teachers that they must wear the ugliest, brightest and gaudiest sweaters and accessories for every holiday? Is there research out there that says students will learn better if their teacher's attire is crazy bright and busy? It was bad enough for Halloween that almost every teacher (well, usually the ones over 40) walked around for weeks before in orange and black. But now I have seen bad taste gone overboard. Giant snowmen, snowflakes, Christmas trees adorn many a teacher's upper body. One of my superiors was wearing a blood-red sweater with matching tie with Santas on it. How can I take him seriously? "
Well recently the dress code wars have reared their ugly head at my office and I wanted to let Cassie know she was not alone. It isn't just teachers that seem to have gotten some memo to dress in an ugly juvenile fashion. It's also nurses. Once a nurse over 40 is taken out of the hospital and no longer has to wear scrubs their take take on business casual is just horrifying. not only did we go through the ugly holiday top period which I believe Cassie described beautifully, nut we are now back into the usual pattern of dress like your in kindergarten. The ways grown women accomplish this is by wearing turtlenecks with little animals all over them. Or tiny seasonal patterns on the turtle necks, like fall leaves, or little hearts, or snowflakes.
Or when the dress code says no t-shirts they assume it doesn't mean no t-shirts that someone has thrown glitter on. We actually had a woman who came to work one day in coral corduroy pants, I didn't know they made those for people over 10.
Or my favorite happened the other day when on of the old women said to one of the 30 somethings "we have this dress code because your not dressed appropriately when you wear cargo pants". The punchline to this was that the older co-worker was wearing a brown velour track suit with fall colored leaves on the jacket part and she thought her outfit was totally appropriate.
Another thing I really liked was our new dress code had to specify no skorts. Skorts were actually a problem at our office. (By the way skort isn't even in spellcheck which proves people shouldn't be wearing them!) 60 yr old women walking around in floral skorts. I really never thought I would see those again once I was out of grade school.
So just know I too work with the fashion challenged and the next holiday is Valentine's day which is another experience in scary clothing at my office. I wonder if I sneak a camera in if I can get pictures without getting caught. I have to think about that.
R.