A little off the top

So for the past few years I tend to grow my hair out a bit during the fall and winter, but some time in the late spring I’ll have it clippered down to a quarter-inch or so all the way around, an anti-style known as “my summer haircut”. I might touch it up once or twice over the summer, and then the growing out begins again. Sunrise, sunset.

Anyway, this past Friday I went under the shears, which was definitely convenient for the ensuing weekend of outdoor party set-up and clean-up and enjoyment in the middle. Of course, when I came back to work yesterday, I got all of the compulsory “whoa, didn’t recognize you there!” comments that usually attend. Since I just started on this particular contract last June, and even when I started was mainly working remotely until well into the fall, no one in this office had ever seen my abrupt solstice-centric conversion from longhaired to buzzed, so everyone felt that much more compelled to comment. (Also, this particular DoD office has a lot of Army vets who, I think, are always amused when someone goes from a recognizably civilian hairstyle to a more basic training ready ‘do.)


I am more than fine with the rubbernecking, which does not faze me in the slightest (even though my preference at work is to stay pretty well below the radar), but as luck would have it yesterday was the first day onsite for a new hire who has the privilege of sitting in the storage room with me. To clarify a little, the windowless interior room where my current workstation is located was once a small conference room, so it’s got enough space to accommodate multiple cubiclettes along the walls, everyone facing away from the center of the room, just as the space once allowed for a large central table with six or eight seats around it, everyone facing into the middle. It is not, in fact, a closet (just in case my humorous exaggerations have misled you). So my new co-worker, who is a perfectly nice older woman with a couple decades experience in the defense industry, had a bit of a double-whammy first day. Of course nothing was really ready for her, so she doesn’t have a working computer, or an access card to log on to the network even if she had a working computer, or even a proper badge that would allow her to roam the halls unescorted. All she could do yesterday was sit at her cubiclette and read some documentation and collateral as a kind of DIY orientation. Which was interrupted every twenty-seven minutes or so by someone poking their head in the room and saying “Hey, what’s up, haircut?” Must have bugged the crap out of her.

But now it’s another day and the unsolicited tonsorial feedback seems to be exhausted, but my co-worker remains un-computered. My money’s on the equipment getting hooked up and working correctly some time in her fourth week here, so I hope she enjoys the reading. Not too much, though, or she might start reading this over my shoulder. Awkward!