Wearing a shirt and tie in Phoenix


When I worked for Bank One in downtown Phoenix in the '90s, I wore a shirt and tie. I'm sure that the company had some kind of dress code, but I never knew about it. I just knew that if you dressed as if you were going to be playing tennis that day, you would feel very out of place in the marketing department. That's me up there, getting my picture taken for "the One Card".

Nowadays, of course, when I see someone wearing a shirt and tie in the Phoenix area, I have to wonder "what are they thinking?"

Let's face it, Phoenix is hot. Wearing a dress shirt, buttoned up to the top, with a tie around your neck, is no way to keep cool. And even the lightest suit (I always wore what was called a "tropical blend") is enough to make most guys start sweating just walking from their car to a building in Phoenix. So when I tell people that I went to work wearing a suit for years, I have to explain that I worked in a space ship.

I worked at what is now called Chase Tower, at Central and Monroe. I parked my air-conditioned car in the parking garage across the street and walked underground to the tower. Yes, there's an underground tunnel that goes under 1st Street. There was no reason to go outside. Once inside of the tower, I took the elevator to the 31st floor. The building was 75 degrees year-round. That's why I call it a space ship.

At the end of the day, I drove home to my air-conditioned house in suburbia. I rarely stopped anywhere, except when the weather was cool.

So yeah, it's a good idea to have a dress shirt and tie, maybe a suit, or at least a sports coat to wear on special ocassions. But don't expect to wear it much in Phoenix, nor do people expect you to.

Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/PhoenixHistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

Comments

  1. dwberendAugust 14, 2015 at 7:14 PM

    I worked as a funeral assistant during one summer. When I started I only had one charcoal wool suit. I had to quickly but invisibly gather up the flowers at the church load them into a van(with no a/c) rush them to the cemetery and arrange them before the procession arrived. The summer heat combined with the humidity from the grass was miserable. Sometimes I thought I might be joining the departed.

    After the summer I became the lead crematory operator. At least there I didn't have to run.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Slick MickAugust 17, 2015 at 4:52 PM

    and suspenders!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more