I Love Nuts

This T is available at Zazzle
my shirt was way better though...

I used to love shopping at second hand and vintage shops. I loved shopping at these stores because I would find the most random t shirts.

I loved worker/uniform shirts the most. My favorites were the ones with name tags sown on and the ones from strange and obscure shops. One day I found one that said: I Love Nuts, with a picture of some nuts and bolts, from a local nuts and bolts company. I thought this shirt was the funniest thing. What a clever, fun play on words, and it was my favorite color, baby blue! It probably cost me two bucks, I was 18 and I wore this t shirt everywhere.

Even work. I had landed a great job at the first preschool I had ever been to where I would enroll my own children. If I had any. The kids couldn't read it and the only thing that could make it inappropriate was the play on words. I wore this shirt a few times a month, as soon as I laundered it, I would wear it again.

My first year went great, my boss asked me to get my administration units so that I would be qualified to work as an assistant director. I loved what I was doing and it seemed that I had, as far as I could tell, a bright future at this school.

One afternoon when I got home from work my cousin was over eating lunch with my mom. When she saw me she said,"Did you just come from work?"

"Yes", I answered.

"Did you wear that shirt to work?", she asked very McJudgy like.

"What? Yeah. I don't change my clothes before I come home", I answered annoyed.

"That's not very professional. I can't believe your allowed to wear that. Your boss is seriously OK with it?", she asked in disbelief.

"Uh, yeah I'm seriously allowed  to wear it. I guess she doesn't care, she's never said anything to the contrary. And I wear this A LOT," I said agitated with this line of questioning.

She dropped it.

A few more months went by and we had staff reviews. My review was great. We were rated in various areas on a 1-5 scale, 1 was bad, 5 was excellent. I got mostly 5s and a few 4s. I was pretty happy. At the end there was a comments section with some praises and some things I could improve upon.

Guess what the improvements were? Number one, use a prep time to dust, tidy my cabinets, supplies and wipe down table and chair legs. (I've never been one for dusting or organization) Number 2, stop wearing my nuts and bolts shirt! It wasn't professional.

I couldn't believe it! (What a silly naive kid I was, but I was 18, maybe 19 years old, can you blame me) My cousin was right. The weird thing wasn't that my boss didn't appreciate the cheeky t shirt, but that I had been working at this place for over 18 months! I had worn that shirt dozens of times, and I didn't know that my boss didn't think it was appropriate for work.