Dressed in Excess

Chris Hodenfield is presently engaged in the toughest blood sport in America—finding a job in a post-recession marketplace overriden with fellow midlifers packing great resumes. Join him in his high adventures and travails....

Preparing for a job interview is like getting ready for a date. You've got to make sure the threads are right for the occasion.

This is where I envy the guys of the hip-hop generation. They never seem to agonize about office apparel. Hat turned sideways? Shirt-tail out? We're good to go. Even if it's a fancy occasion, like the Christmas party at a fine club, their dress code holds. Even if their girlfriends really took time to look beautiful, the guys know that casual is cool.

This must be the confidence you get when your very existence tells the world that rivers of digital information pour through your bloodstream and folks  better get hip and hire you.

 It is hardly any solace, of course, to the guy whose childhood imprint of the manly beau ideal veers less toward Snoop Dogg and more toward James Bond.

So there I stood at the closet door the other day, pondering my hot date of a job interview. I had made inquiries about the company's dress code but learned nothing definitive. It was a media company, which suggested loose tolerances and no shortage of black T-shirts.

But who really knows? It was also a media empire. Everybody eventually goes button-down when the billions start to rise. Even at sports organizations started by a rumpled crew of Oscar Madisons, rising corporate influence always brings out the heels and neckties.

Maybe this is why Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to sell Facebook, even for a billion. He can't stomach the idea of seeing blue blazers in the lunchroom.

I couldn't take chances. Out came the nice shirt and tie. In deference to this being a media company, and not some white-shoes law firm, I went past the suit coat in favor of a sport coat.

I got to the office and looked around. It was a big, sprawling place that resembled a basketball gym stuff with a hundred cubicles. Was anyone wearing a necktie? OK, a couple guys were wearing ties — hip neckties, like silver cowboy strands over black shirts. I saw an old friend and we waved to each other and grinned: My natty outfit meant only one thing.

I waited in the boss' office and everyone was nice.

Then he walked in.            

Rolled in, would be more like it. He looked like he'd been tossed from bed after pulling an all-nighter. His rumpled khakis could barely contain his midsection. His scrunched-up white shirt was only partially buttoned. His bleary gaze came at me through a cascade of tumbling hair.

I suddenly felt like an undertaker at an amusement park.

Of course, if a fortune-teller had told me that morning that the boss I'd be seeing would look like he'd just come from a wino convention, I wouldn't have dug through the hamper for my worst chinos and pajama tops. It is nice, though, to imagine getting dolled up for a job interview in clothes that proclaim: "I'm as comfortable as a Siamese cat licking its fur, and what do you want?"

We talked for a while, the rumpled boss and I. As more people came and went in his office, it appeared that clean T-shirts were indeed the order of the day.

Now a trifle self-conscious about my fine outfit, a line from an old Raymond Chandler novel came to mind: "He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."

OK, next time I'm going the total Hells Angel ensemble.