"Dressing for success, (casually)"

The summer season is basically in full swing now, with today being Independence Day. The older I get though, the harder it is for me to be able to tell when it's a holiday or not. I only say this because the way we dress for weekends and summer holidays seems to have spilled over into everyday life at work, making it nearly impossible to tell if somebody is engaged in actual, fruitful employment, or is on a full-time, carefree vacation. I've never had a job that it was ok to wear shorts and Nike sneakers to, let alone flip-flops. My work has largely been in construction, wearing blue jeans, a "real" shirt, and boots, which, according to OSHA, should be steel-toed, in case somebody would accidentally drop a huge boulder from Colorado on your foot, as this helps the doctors immensely with the amputation process. OSHA is also responsible for selling the "hard-hat" idea to insurance companies, based on the theory that it's better to live a long life as a drooling, senseless, vegetable than it is to die out-right from a hit to the head by a foreign object. Nevertheless, the "flip-flop" era is among us now, and not just in politics. Everywhere I go, any day of the week, I see people in shorts and flip-flops. At first I thought that there must be a hell of a lot of people either on vacation or welfare, but then I realized that most of these people were actually full-time working men and women, whose employers have taken the "casual Friday" thing possibly a little too seriously. I doubt that many of these employees have to deal with welder sparks or torch burns though. Perhaps I'm just envious of people who can "beat the heat" by wearing weekend clothes to work, while I'm sweating it out in enough cloth and leather to fully clothe an entire chapter of a "Hells Angels" motorcycle gang. I really don't want to take my wife out for lunch in a place that the waitress, (no matter how cute), is barefoot, and I really think the tellers at my bank should wear steel-toed boots, not flip-flops, in case a heavy statement should fall from their desk, or one of my checks start bouncing around. Have a great 4th of July! I'll be here in my usual Sunday mode, shorts, flip-flops, and swilling beer.