I used to work with a guy who wore a “Utili-kilt” every day…and he was quite a character!

And that sounds about right, doesn’t it?

Because you have to be a bit of a wild card to wear one of those things!

Check out why this guy decided to wear a Utili-kilt to work when his employers cracked down on the dress code.

They may take our shorts, but they’ll never take our freedom!

“We had a new CIO take over our IT group.

They had next to no experience/competence and weren’t even a finalist from the selection committee, but were a friend of the CEO and were hired.

This sounds bad…

What they lacked in these area they countered with micromanagement and the demand for absolute professionalism (superficial nonsense, if you will).

One of the first policies they implemented was no-shorts, and attire must be office appropriate (no holes, no graphic T-shirts, etc.; effectively, business casual, especially for supervisors).

Now, there were various positions in IT, but several of us—who were also supervisors—had to work in dirty/unconditioned spaces, etc.

Several of us made requests to wear shorts—installing new cabling in the floor of the server room, unloading/installing equipment, wiring buildings in the summer that had no/low AC, etc.

All were denied.

Here’s an idea…

When walking out of a meeting to discuss this, we noticed that the CIO’s secretary and several of the female office support staff were wearing skirts/skorts.

We brought this up at our next meeting and were assured that this was different, for reasons.

Obviously, the women in our group were not about to wear skits while ITing about, but several started wearing skorts.

Later, I (M) was looking through my ThinkGeek wishlist—told you this was a few years ago—and at some point, I had placed a Utili-kilt in the list.

He knew what to do!

Dear reader, I mashed that Buy button so fast that the kilt arrived the next day.

I also shared this with a few of my closest male coworkers, who did the same.

Early the following week, we all show up in our kilts and our coworkers had a good laugh, as did our manager—a good egg, trying to make the best of the CIO’s eccentricities—who said nothing to the CIO.

It just so happened that on that day a Windows update had borked the CIOs computer and they needed someone to take a look ASAP.

This was gonna be good!

While not my job, I eagerly volunteered as I was in-between tasks. I showed up in my kilt with the CIO present—who just sort of stared as I worked—fixed their computer in a very professional and expedient manner, and left.

Shortly thereafter, I get a message from my manager that we needed to talk. Long story, short, while he was sympathetic, I was in violation of the no-shorts policy.

I said that if women can wear skits, we should be able to as well.

Full disclosure: I was the only person with a very specific, hard-to-come-by skillset, so I was fairly secure in my position and was happy to take one for the team as there’d likely be little consequence for me, personally.

LOL.

Anyway, while we didn’t go crazy with the kilts, we made a point of wearing them when we had some visibility outside of IT, which caused a lot of discussion from other departments—from laughing to good-natured ribbing, to solidarity.

A short time later, we had an all-hands meeting: the policy was being amended so that managers could make exceptions—e.g., when we needed to do building infrastructure maintenance, etc.—and that from now on, Fridays would be casual day (still no shorts, but more relaxed clothing; I honestly think they had seen this on Office Space).

The mutual understanding, though, was that in return, we needed to retire the kilts, which we did… for the most part.

That was a funny and effective approach to getting the ridiculous dress code modified.

Now let’s see what folks had to say about this on Reddit.

This person has been there…

Another individual had a lot to say.

This Reddit user spoke up.

Another reader chimed in.

And this reader shared their thoughts.

Malicious compliance never felt so good!

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.