james mckay dot net

I didn’t often have to wear a tie when I was working at Kingdom Faith.

The main exception was when we went out on ministry trips. Especially overseas. It’s funny how the hotter the country you are visiting, and the less reliable the air conditioning, the more insistent they are that you wear a suit and tie.

In Africa, for instance, especially in churches which meet in makeshift tin roofed buildings, immaculate suits are de rigeur. In Malaysia, on the other hand, you can sometimes get away with substituting the jacket and tie with a batik shirt, which is generally considered fairly formal wear in that neck of the woods. However, the air con generally works in Malaysia — often so efficiently that a jacket and tie are the preferable alternative.

Once we got back home again and I was safely ensconced behind the computer, generally the sartorial requirements eased off. For a few years, pastors had to wear ties on a day to day basis, but that rule fell by the wayside a few years back, and besides, I was never made a pastor, so the amount of tie-wearing that I had to do was never too onerous.

This was a Good Thing. I am, of course, a software developer, or, as my last boss at KF repeatedly insisted on calling me, “a geek.” And one of the key features of being a geek is a very strong preference for comfortable clothes — and a pathological aversion to ties.

Some developers will not even accept employment at companies that require them to wear ties. However, much as I can’t stand the things, I am prepared to take a more pragmatic approach.

When I started at my present job nearly two years ago, the dress code mandated a tie. It had done ever since the company was founded. I didn’t complain at the time — it was a new phase in my life, and it conveyed a sense of professionalism, so I decided to set aside my geek sensibilities and go with the flow.

However, fortunately, things move on, and nowadays the corporate dress code is somewhat more relaxed, mainly because in the Web 2.0 industry, ties are distinctly in the minority. Nowadays we only tend to wear them when meeting clients.

I think the general geek aversion to ties stems from the fact that apart from making you uncomfortable and restricting the flow of blood to your brain, they serve no apparent purpose whatsoever. Yeah, I know there’s the whole thing about non-verbal communication and looking professional and reliable and businesslike, but I wonder if somehow, with a bit of creativity, fashion designers could come up with alternatives that convey exactly the same message in a much more comfortable way?

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Posted at 14:00 on 11 October 2007.
Tagged: dress sense, ties

I sometimes wonder why I bother wearing a cycle helmet when I take my bike in to work. As far as I’m aware they’re not a legal requirement here in the UK and personally I think that’s a Good Thing. I’ve been observing other cyclists when I go into work and back home again, and it seems that we helmet-wearers are definitely in the minority. They do make you feel safer, but I sometimes wonder if that feeling is more a palliative than anything else. They’re uncomfortable, they make your head sweat like crazy, they’re bulky and cumbersome, and they make you look a complete wuss. And if what Wikipedia says on the subject is to be believed, there is no conclusive evidence that they make the slightest bit of difference to safety in the first place.

Regardless of whether I wear a cycle helmet or not, one thing you’ll never see me wearing when I’m on my bike is lycra — that horrible figure hugging stuff that reveals the outlines of those parts of you which should really be treated with more modesty. It may be aerodynamic and all the rest of it, but personally I think it makes you look so awful that it’s embarrassing, even if you are fit and healthy. It screams that you’re one of those fitness freaks who view cycling as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end and don’t care if you end up looking a total prat in the process.

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Posted at 20:22 on 25 May 2007.
Tagged: cycling, dress sense

We are being treated to some Highland bagpipe, erm, entertainment, this afternoon, from a busker in a kilt and a T-shirt just outside our offices.

It is absolutely excruciating.

Now before my readers north of the border burn me at the stake for being a Sassenach heretic, let me hasten to add that bagpipes can sound good in the right setting. At the Highland Games in Braemar, for instance, or at a wedding, when they’re played by someone with a bit of talent. Or, of course, on a Delirious? album.

Unfortunately, they never sound good just outside your offices. Especially when you’re a geek up to your ears in computer code and trying to concentrate.

Besides which, you need quite a bit of talent on the bagpipes if you don’t want to sound like you’re trying to give a cat a bath. And this gentleman doesn’t have an awful lot of that. He keeps making mistakes, with the result that it sounds at best like the musical equivalent of a teenager’s typo-ridden MySpace blog, and at worst like Vogon poetry.

In any case, he seems to be ignorant of one particularly important fact about Scottish culture. Kilts are formal dress. They only have the desired effect when worn as part of the full Highland regalia. Combining one with a T-shirt is on the same part of the bad taste scale as the combination of shorts and socks and open-toed sandals on a fifty year old obese American.

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Posted at 16:03 on 20 October 2006.
Tagged: bagpipes, buskers, dress sense, Scotland

So here endeth ye first day at ye new job. It was pretty good — the advice of one person to me that “the first day is always the worst” bodes well for the future because the first day wasn’t actually all that bad. Is it a case of first the worst, second the best, third the royal princess, as we used to chant at school? We shall see…

You will probably all be intrigued to know that I actually succumbed to wrapping a strip of cloth round my neck and tying a knot in it. This is a fairly major miracle for someone like me, whose general sartorial preference tends to lean rather strongly in the direction of the “high comfort, low maintenance” variety of a T-shirt and jeans/shorts/combats and the trademark Vans trainers. To put on a garment such as a tie, whose primary purpose seems to be to undermine the above principles and make you feel like you’re being asphyxiated, is not exactly my idea of a rip-roaringly good time. Having said that, however, it very much puts your mind into a mood for work and makes you feel a lot more business-like, as well as making you look good to the clients, so it has a lot going for it.

So will this new look beat my previous record of a year and a half as my longest lasting New Year’s Resolution, or will geekiness prevail? Well, just in case you thought that ties were a bit low on geek credit, Cambridge physicists Thomas Fink and Yong Mao have determined, using mathematical modelling, that there are no less than eighty-five ways to tie a tie, of which ten are aesthetically pleasing. Which of them are the most comfortable?

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Posted at 00:56 on 4 January 2006.
Tagged: dress sense, ties