SHIRT DRESSES THAT LOOK A LITTLE TOO MUCH LIKE SHIRTS

Elizabeth Tan

We need to have a talk with the girls in the office about the uncomfortable liminality of the tops they wear over their leggings. It is becoming extremely distracting, the ontological indeterminacy of their fashion. Is it a blouse? Is it a tunic? Is it a dress? These troubling questions are not conducive to productivity in the workplace.

We will hire a speaker from a company that makes presentations for employees about delicate topics like this. This is how we will maintain goodwill with the girls in the office, just like our strategy of calling the girls in the office ‘girls in the office’.

All female staff members will be required to attend a special presentation before tea-break on Wednesday and we will get to the bottom of this bottom-covering business.

*

Our headquarters overlook the eastern side of New Hyde Park. Our favourite feature of the park is the artificial duck pond. Each duck is programmed to randomly cycle through five behaviour modes: one, floating on water; two, diving underneath the water; three, walking on land; four, resting on land; five, cleaning. Sometimes, there is magic: three or more ducks will simultaneously engage their first mode while travelling along the same trajectory, so it appears they are following one another, single file, across the green water.

From our distant viewpoint, in our air-conditioned node, we can watch the ducks all day long.

*

It’s Tuesday when the pigeon arrives in a yellow box with a red label. The pigeon comes equipped with a supply of food pellets and a filofax and it has memorised more than 10,000 aphorisms derived from popular songs of the nineties. Initial feedback on the pigeon’s performance as a floating office assistant has been positive. On its first morning, the pigeon even resolved the longstanding paper jam in Photocopier Unit 5. The photocopier room is once again melodious with productivity. ‘How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?’ asks the pigeon, and we couldn’t agree more.

*

We are engaged in negotiations to acquire a company that specialises in engineering meet-cutes, which is called Me-Q. They have achieved notoriety recently for accomplishing an extremely complex meet-cute between two non-corporeal entities: the vengeful spirit that haunts the abandoned treadmill factory and a malevolent software program. The most recent quarterly report indicates that the couple are very happy and regularly reminisce about that fateful meeting on the Bluetooth-enabled printer at Fit & Fetch Gym. Cross-platform meet-cutes of this nature are highly sophisticated and we believe the acquisition of Me-Q will help us diversify our range of client services.

*

Marjory Turner arrives at nine o’clock on Wednesday to introduce herself to us ahead of the presentation about the Shirt Dresses issue with the girls in the office. We appreciate her navy blue pantsuit and sombre paisley cravat; she is attractive in a tasteful way, like a flight attendant crossed with a funeral director. She delivers a summary of her presentation, which she says will be less of a presentation and more of what she calls a ‘facilitated discussion’. At our request she has incorporated team-building games into her presentation so that the girls in the office do not feel like they are being reprimanded for the Shirt Dresses issue. ‘Many managers request a soft approach,’ Marjory says, ‘one which acknowledges the employees’ individuality and value to the company. Employees who feel like unique, valued individuals are more amenable to rethinking their personal presentation at work. This is my speciality.’

Marjory’s handshake is trustworthy and not too firm. We have a good feeling about this.

*

We have lost the bid to acquire Me-Q. We admit that it was an ambitious move, but it is still a disappointment. Our last conference call with representatives from Me-Q had seemed so hopeful. The laughter was warm and collegial, and the representatives enthused that our companies shared a vision of a synergistic multifaceted future of creative energy and excellence. What other company could have usurped us? Where did we go wrong? Should we have typeset our proposal in a sans-serif font? Should we have included more puns in our presentation?

‘Don’t go chasing waterfalls,’ the pigeon intones.

There has been no noticeable improvement in the outfits of the girls in the office following Marjory Turner’s meeting to address the Shirt Dresses issue. The outfits of the girls in the office are as distractingly ambiguous as ever. In fact, it now feels like the girls in the office are dressing at us. More than once today we have glimpsed a scandalous outline of buttocks peeping below a shirt/dress hemline. The girls in the office are dressing pointedly, with calculation, gleefully transgressing the shirt/dress boundary at every opportunity, calibrating to offend. We feel very attacked by this. We feel targeted. We feel victimised.

*

We have been shocked to discover that the special meeting to address the Shirt Dresses issue was actually a Me-Q plot. Jemima from Payroll and Marjory Turner are in love. We spotted them holding hands at the artificial duck pond at New Hyde Park this morning. We reviewed the minutes from the Shirt Dresses meeting and found this exchange:

Jemima: My name is Jemima. I am going to the picnic and I am taking minted peas, a brioche bun, a tenor saxophone, a voodoo doll, and … jazz hands.

Marjory: What are jazz hands?

Jemima: [demonstrates ‘jazz hands’]

Marjory: Oh my. I bet you can make some fine jazz with those hands.

Jemima: Thank you. Nice to meet you.

‘Love can touch us one time and last for a lifetime,’ the pigeon says, confirming our suspicions. Jemima and Marjory are in love. The facilitated discussion on the Shirt Dresses issue instead facilitated their romance. We facilitated their meet-cute. Me-Q has bested us again.

*

Violet from the receptionist pool, who first brought the voodoo doll to the icebreaker picnic, requests a meeting on Monday morning.

She says that many of the girls in the office have expressed discomfort with the Shirt Dresses meeting – not with Marjory, who they found delightful, but with the idea that there had to be a Shirt Dresses meeting at all. She asks us to ask ourselves whether we are fostering a misogynistic culture that unfairly polices what women should wear and holds women accountable for the inappropriate responses that men might have about what women wear.

And while we are on the topic she requests that we no longer refer to the girls in the office as ‘girls in the office’, which she says is demeaning, and also overlooks the many men who hold administrative positions in the office, and who incidentally did not have to attend the Shirt Dresses meeting.

We are disquieted about all of this, and have resolved to take this feedback on board.

*

‘Plant a seed, plant a flower, plant a rose,’ the pigeon says. ‘You can plant any one of those. Keep planting to find out which one grows. It’s a secret no one knows.’ And perhaps this is Me-Q’s real talent: planting seeds, innocuous seeds of hope and love and change, quietly infiltrating every corner of society, every office and boardroom, monstrous perfect little seeds. How did we lose that acquisition bid? Was there even a sincere opportunity for acquisition? What other plots have we unwittingly brought to fruition? Is Me-Q running this entire city?

Is it really the ontological indeterminacy of the shirt/dress binary that distresses us, or is it actually the slippage between the tights/leggings binary? When do tights become leggings? When do leggings become pants? Or is ‘pants’ the generic category that encompasses leggings and tights?

Are we fostering a culture in which women’s outfits are inappropriately scrutinised?

Is it we who have been inappropriate all this while?

*

Our company and Me-Q are in love. The acquisition takeover bid was their meet-cute. The Me-Q executives are scrambling to schedule a meeting with us – apparently, they were blind-sided too. Our company and Me-Q are merging with or without our approval. The two companies have already purchased a web domain name that is a cute portmanteau of their former names. They’ve already registered a new ASX ticker symbol. They’ve already accumulated more than 20,000 Twitter followers.

Everyone in the office is shell-shocked. Several times today we have noticed a staff member leave their desk and then freeze in the aisle or corridor, gazing at nothing, before returning to their seat, like ducks rebooting themselves after a glitch. We have seen staff members stare at pencils, bulldog clips, even their own typing fingers with some newfound suspicion, as if the solidity of these objects may no longer be taken for granted, as if it is in our very act of taking-for-granted that these objects could gain dangerous autonomy.

The pigeon tries to cajole us back to work: ‘You gotta be cool, you gotta be calm, you gotta stay together.’ So: we stay together. When someone is seen alone in the tea room, another staff member will come up to stand beside them, and another, and another, no matter the rank. These silent huddles form all over the office.

‘Love will save the day,’ the pigeon assures us, as officers from Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable join hands, as a legal adviser exchanges a scared little smile with a junior technician, as the photocopiers slide documents into our waiting hands with more warmth and tenderness than usual.

*

The executives from the former Me-Q agree to meet us at New Hyde Park. It is a summery Friday afternoon and we discard our suit jackets and loosen our ties and cuffs, walking over the perfect green grass to the artificial duck pond. The Me-Q executives have managed to arrive before us and have arranged for tea, pastries and light music. They are such good planners.

We do not talk about business right away. We tell the Me-Q executives about how much we enjoy watching the ducks from our node, and that this is the closest we have ever been to the ducks. The pastries are excellent and there is every kind of tea available. In silence we watch a duck move from mode one to mode two and back again, gracefully and convincingly, the duration spent on each mode never quite the same – so lifelike is its randomness, so perfect are its in-built imperfections.

When we and the Me-Q executives at last begin to discuss the future, we realise we are surrounded by light, by newness. The glazed pastries, the glistening pond, the jewel-like eyes of the ducks. We remember our purpose. We implement solutions. We capitalise. We turn weaknesses into strengths, threats into opportunities.

‘Imagination,’ the pigeon says. ‘Life is your creation.’