Welcome to my Nightmare

...and it isn't just an Alice Cooper song anymore. I am interning in the corporate office of a huge company; what it is and what I do I can’t say on pain of my head being shoved in the guillotine. But I can tell you one thing, which is that nobody around here has an inkling of fashion sense whatsoever.
Fashion really only holds one around this place, and that’s distinguishing status. You can easily tell the businessmen from the common schlubs from the way they dress. The latter are usually outfitted in Permatuck shirts and a pair of worn-in slacks as opposed to the starched and bleached businessmen. Case in point: sometimes I wonder how some of them are actually able to bend a limb in their impeccably dry-cleaned getups. Color is also a decisive factor: you rarely see actual businessmen deviating from the achingly stereotypical blacks, grays, browns, navy and the occasional pale blue when the schlubs wear all manner of colors and prints and those horrible check patterns that remind me of the scene from Fathers’ Day when Billy Crystal bluntly snaps at a gingham-clad Robin Williams that he’s a dead ringer for Howdy Doody. The barriers aren’t too different for women; not an ounce of actual color seems to touch the bona fide businesswomen, while the secretaries float around in pastel, bold and (often tacky) patterned ensembles that scream Dress Barn clearance rack!
And then you have me.
Take one glance at my wardrobe and it’s obvious I’m out of my element. I’ve adhered to the dress code in the most technical sense possible, but to date (is that month-to-date?)I must have broken every unwritten law of corporate dressing that possibly exists. In the past three weeks I’ve dared to parade studs, platforms, chains, dark nails, knee-high boots, leather, denim (outside of Fridays) smoky eyes, skinny jeans, animal prints, bold shadow, red lips, and even skulls around this place without being axed (the skulls belong to a prized Tarina Tarantino necklace and appear to be nothing more than innocuous Lucite beads from far away). Of course, it isn’t like I decked myself out in all of these at once; forget merely being axed, I probably wouldn’t even be allowed within 500 feet of the building. And if you’re asking how the hell I even got past security with denim on between Monday and Thursday, the answer is that in the absence of an electron microscope, black, white, or gray herringbone denim can be very deceptive to the human eye. But as far as fashion goes I’m an anomaly nonetheless. The secretaries glare at me in disgust and the businesswomen in sheer confusion. Each must be thinking, Is she one of us? Is she one of them? Is she one of anything? So you basically have the former in all their gaudiness, the latter in all their monotony and whatthefuckisthat in her studded leather boots.

Welcome to my nightmare.