Imagine having a job where you’re sometimes in a hot or dirty environment where typical business casual clothes aren’t the best idea. If your boss made a rule that you couldn’t wear casual clothes like shorts to work, would you comply, fight the rule or come up with a creative way to get the boss to change his mind?

In this story, one male employee is in this situation, and he thinks it’s not fair that he can’t wear shorts but women can wear skirts.

Then he has a great idea.

Let’s read the whole story.

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

(this happened a few years ago and our compliance wasn’t exactly malicious, but I thought I’d share…)

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.

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

There was a new dress code.

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.

There was a loophole for women.

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.

Apparently, there’s also a loophole for the men!

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 Utilikilt in the list.

Dear reader, I mashed that buy button so fast that the kilt damned near 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.

Perfect timing!

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.

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.

He made a good point.

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.

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.

Now, there’s a new rule when it comes to the dress code.

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.

Managers sometimes make decisions without really thinking about what benefits the employees and what’s fair to everyone. He did a great job of proving his point.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This man bought a kilt too!

Another man did the same thing.

This company didn’t have a very strict dress code, but one person still wore a kilt.

It doesn’t make sense.

Every rule needs at least one exception.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.