"Arnold" wrote in message
A few years ago I applied for a Java role at an animation studio. They
told me up front to come dressed casually and for some reason I
suspected this was some kind of trap (you know, see if I actually
respected them enough to wear a suit).
When I turned up I was shocked to find both interviewers in tee shirts,
shorts and sandals. Then I looked around and the entire (extremely
youthful) workforce was dressed similarly.
That reminds me of an incident where I was teaching a class at a
customer site where I had never been. When we were organizing the
course, I asked the customer who was requesting the course what their
company dress code was so that I'd know how to dress for the class. He
told me they were business casual. When I arrived though, EVERYONE in
the class was dressed in suits! Naturally, I'd taken the customer at his
word and wore business casual. (He was in the class himself.)
I never figured out why he misinformed me like that. I simply ignored
the situation and wore a suit on the second day of the class. (It was a
two day class.) If he ever complained to my boss about what I wore the
first day, I never heard about it.
Maybe it was a terminology thing. I remember trying to help a customer
with a DSL issue one time and I needed to know how many phone jacks she
had in her house and what was connected to each one. She said she had
three phone jacks but when I asked what was connected to each one, she
claimed there was NOTHING plugged into any of them. I asked if she was
calling on a cell phone; she said she was on a landline. I asked her to
trace the wire from the phone to the jack and she did. I thought that
would make it crystal clear to her what I meant by a phone jack. It
didn't. She still insisted that each of the three jacks had nothing
connected to them. Only later did the penny finally drop and she finally
comprehended what I meant and gave me the proper information. Clearly,
she didn't had some other term that she used where the rest of us say
"phone jack". (And no, she did not have a problem with the English
language. As far as I could tell, she was a lifelong American.) Maybe my
customer just didn't know what "business casual" really meant and
thought that if they were wearing two piece suits instead of three
piece, that meant they were "business casual"....
