Tattoos, Piercings, Slip into Dress Codes

I found this news bit on Yahoo! News this morning.  The article wasn’t written with libraries (or librarians) in mind in the strictest sense, but it’s interesting to me that the writer does in fact focus on a librarian in Kentucky with some very nice tribal work.  Personally, I knew a long time ago that if I was going to stay even marginally marketable anywhere outside NYC, I was going to have to "self censor" the tattoos I got (you won’t see anything on me at work, but I don’t generally wear anything more revealing than a polo shirt and dress pants either).  For that matter, I can point to a coworker who has a tongue piercing and a major tattoo, but you wouldn’t know it from the way she shows up to work every day.  But as I said, in NYC you can get away with a lot more than you might be able in, say Ohio, where I think they still have the death penalty for speeding.

I do think it’d be an amazing experiment–not that I know how to go about conducting it–to have a day where everybody in the world of work would just show off their body art–tats, piercings, what have you–just to see who was int he club and who was not.  How many doctors, lawyers, politicians, and undertakers would there be?  There’d a a lot of librarians, at least if my local sample is any indication (see previous note about speeding in Ohio).  And they wouldn’t all be weekend bikers, either.  How about plumbers, electricians, and IT people?   Housewives? (Househusbands?)  Preachers?  Writers?  Actors?  Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers?  PR execs (one of them made it into the article I linked to, so you never know)?

Maybe that’s the point.  You never know.  And, as long as the customer services is consistently good, does it really matter?