Yesterday was my first post-layoff job interview. The email confirmation I received from them gave me the time and address of the meeting as well as reminder that it is a ‘casual office’.

Hm, this means I can’t wear a suit. But how casual is casual? I assumed that they would be in jeans, but I can’t wear jeans. Maybe black pants? Ok, except that my black pants need to be ironed and I don’t do that very well.

Ok, so a dress, but which one? A ‘casual’ dress? Those make me look like I’m headed to a party or out for date night. A business dress? It’s practically the same as a suit but without the jacket.

Ugh! Why are you messing with my head! I tried on 7 dresses and one skirt, two different colored tights and three pair of shoes.

In the end I had about 2 and a half minutes to get out of the house and grabbed the first dress I had tried on, threw on my coat and tried not to obsess over it.

My meeting was with two women both in jeans, I confessed that I had changed about 5 times to be casual but not too casual and they also confessed that they were pretty dressed up, but they didn’t want to dress up too much because they had told me they were casual.

If I get this job, I’m pretty sure it will be because of our shared fixation on fashion. This seems like as a good a reason to hire me as any, right?

Footnote to this story: Last night I had a dream that I got this job and showed up this first day in a t-shirt, just a t-shirt, no pants, no underwear. It was not a long t-shirt. No one seemed to notice.