Business casual

It's been a week of challenges, as you'd expect with any new job. The biggest of these has been the 'business casual' wardrobe. Somehow I've avoided getting into this fashion grey area until now. To me it seems you end up buying casual clothes that you don't really want to wear, or you wear legitimate casual clothes to the office and contaminate them with workplace associations. Lose lose dude!

It does give me the perfect excuse to go shopping though. The last couple of years have been the most frugal of my life, but the urge to buy things was always lurking. Not so much a lack of materialism as a lack of money, or to say it another way, you can take the boy out of Sydney, but you can't take Sydney out of the boy. And now I can shop with impunity - it's for work!

My first stop was Myer, where I had a bit of a low moment. For a start, I'm not a big fan of the way the clothes are laid out by label. Can't we just have the great wall of jeans, with every brand known to man in one place? Perhaps a store attendant or two? Instead I ended up in the change room with a pair of slim leg jeans. WTF? This style is so temporary, you can practically hear the denim ticking. Plus it's totally impractical heading into summer. But it wasn't just the jeans that did me in. All through the store I felt like I was looking at the wardrobe department for Australian Idol. Okay, so I may be getting old, and I may have become a bit of a tight arse over the last couple of years, but the idea of paying $50 for a t-shirt that is just 'okay' doesn't seem quite right to me. I got out of there with a pair of jeans that aren't too 'restrictive' (and they'll stretch, right? Tell me they'll stretch.) and a shirt. Next on the agenda, shoes.