2001-06-06 - 4:52 p.m.
Over the weekend a friend of mine who�s in medical school gave me a perfectly logical explanation for the "Smart Scrubs" store in my neighborhood. No, it�s not the newest fashion trend among urban hipsters--it�s just that there are two major hospitals nearby and many of their employees live in the vicinity and have to buy their own scrubs. Hospital personnel are all color-coded these days--attending physicians wear green, interns wear blue, nurses wear patterns (flowers, or maybe Disney characters if they�re pediatric nurses and want to trick patients into thinking they�re in some cartoon fantasyland instead of the chamber of horrors that is a modern hospital), and so on. It�s not like "Emergency!" anymore, where everyone at Rampart wore white and you could tell the nurses apart by their minidresses and Flying Nun hats.
This all makes sense, I guess. The world of medicine isn�t gender-stratified anymore--at least not as stratified as it used to be--and I�m sure that for a female neurosurgeon with an MD from Johns Hopkins having every elderly patient with a bunion yelling "Nurse! NURSE!" at her gets old really fast. Still, for an occasional patient like me, all the color-coding makes the inside of a hospital even more Brave New World-ish than it already was to start with.
A while ago I read an article--I forget where--claiming that over half of the workers in the U.S. now wear some kind of uniform to work. The figure sounds high, until you think about all the people you come into contact with on an average day. Fast-food workers. Supermarket checkers. Gas-station attendants. Delivery people. Department store clerks. Shit, I was at the mall recently and even the annoying people who stand next to the directories and chirp out, "Can I help you find anything?" if you look lost are being dressed up these days. They look like Park Avenue doormen crossed with demented refugees from an Amway seminar. I feel sorry for them.
Some uniforms are sexy--police uniforms, say, or military fatigues--at least if the right people are wearing them. Even corporate-dress-code attire can be sexy, in a stop-the-elevator-between-floors-and-rip-each-other�s-clothes-off sort of way. But most workers� uniforms inspire no erotic thoughts whatsoever--or if they do, the people having them desperately need their heads examined. It�s about caste-system reinforcement, pure and simple. If a business wanted to make sure its employees stood out so customers who needed help could find them easily, it would pin name-tags to employees� shirts and be done with it. But what reason besides abject humiliation would a supermarket like Albertson�s have for making its checkers wear babyshite-tan polyester shirts with the company logo stamped in miniature all over them? What outfits like this say to me is, "This one knows his/her station and has no hope of ever moving beyond it. Would he/she wear stuff this hideous otherwise?"
Not all employees share this opinion, of course--I recall one worker in the article I read saying something like, "I enjoy dressing up for work. It makes me feel like I�m part of the company, part of something outside of myself." Well, gee willikers, Miss Thang--if The Company gave you a Dixie cup full of poisoned Kool-Aid, I bet you�d drink right up, wouldn�t you?
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