There are few things as merciless as office air conditioning. When I graduated from college and started temping in giant office buildings I made the grave mistake of dressing as if it were summer. Armed with a vague sense of professional attire and deep conviction that I had a cute post-collegiate bod, I had purchased a series of ill-advised (OK, OK, I mean “skimpy”) outfits. I was so cold I felt nauseated. In short course I learned to bring a sweater to work, and in shorter course I tired of selecting a different sweater every day, as if it were winter. There was no putting together of a proper outfit—heavy patterned-snowflake and Fair Isle sweaters looked uniformly bad with summer dresses and skirts. It was then that I joined the legions of women who keep a huge wool sweater, fleece jacket, or wrap at the office to keep warm.
Forget the thin, matching cardigans recommended by fashion magazines. If you are going to sit still in an office environment that’s cooled to the lower sixties, then you are going to need some serious warmth, with enough bulk to fit over whatever else you’re wearing. This will be your second-tier sweater. It’s about two years from being donated to the Salvation Army. In other words, in Yiddish words, your schmatta—literally the word meaning “rag,” it has also come to describe the shapeless article of clothing you throw on in a pinch.
The office schmatta is a career killer. As has oft been writ in those how-women-can-get-ahead-at-the-office books, nothing screams “unimportant functionary” like a rug-type thing worn over business attire. Can Kleenex up the sleeve be far off? Add spectacles on a chain and you have completed the thought for your boss that “Peggy is great at contracts” rather than “Peggy should be at the table for major contract negotiations.” Note that I am not equating doom with being secretarial. Powerful executive assistants at the companies I worked for were impervious to the chill, wore short-sleeved dresses in the latest style (this was in the early 1990s when there were annual styles and hemlines), dispatched the requests quivering junior professional staff, and seemed steam powered. If there were sweaters anywhere near them, they matched the dress and nevertheless were usually flung beside their work bags. Senior professional women, on the other hand, could combat the chill by wearing high-necked blouses and business suits of summer-weight wool, never poplin or linen. You also got the feeling that they were thinking so hard in their offices that their metabolism must have been boosted, unlike me, left shivering in my cubicle over dull spreadsheets when not making personal calls or sneaking peeks at Vanity Fair.
My years in the workforce have taught me that there are two solutions to prevent freezing in the office. One is menopause. Is it terrible that I feel envious of my colleagues in short-sleeved blouses with fans blowing on them as they sip ice water? I recently padded over to a retirement-aged coworker—“padded” because I had put on my gym socks after my toes, exposed by sandals, felt at risk for frostbite—and asked, like a piteous child out of Dickens, “What is it like to be warm?” “Oh honey, it’s something!” She laughed with furnace-like warmth.
The other solution is shameful, yet incredibly effective: The personal space heater. On top of the heaps of electricity that are used to reduce hot air to frigid temperatures, I add even more kilowatts by heating it up again. It’s so wrong, and yet so right—I leave my house sweater-less, dressed in proper summertime clothes, and I show up to meetings and walk the halls of my office looking perky and professional. I can leave behind the bedraggled sweaters and fleecy smocks. It is bad to waste our planet’s resources, yet when I contemplate the ultimate punishment for this all I can think is, I know, I know, I’m going to hell. But it’s warm there.
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