Paula's Place

Paula's Place

Thursday 11 June 2015

A Work Day Out

Yesterday was a big day, I attended an all day Textiles Recycling Conference at The London Museum in the heart of the City of London.   Although I have been to a couple of Chartered Institute of Waste Management meetings this year as myself this would be the first time many in my industry would have known about my transition, never mind actually seeing me.   Naturally I was a little apprehensive so I wanted to make sure that I was looking my best, and of course appropriate.   Appropriate is always difficult for this sort of thing, some people decide that they are representing their organisation and so they dress up more than for a normal day in the office, others decide that since they are having a day out of the office they can dress down a little. Others just don't worry.

I had planned on wearing a nice dark blue trouser suit I have had in my wardrobe for a couple of years but rarely had occasion to wear, when it came to it though I decided on a nice grey body con dress with a black jacket.   I felt this looked nice, was quite formal but too much so and was in no way ambiguous.

Not a very god selfie!
Reactions were all positive, I did give one poor fellow a bit of a surprise, but by now we have a new generation of people involved in the industry, who on the whole I would say are a lot more open minded than those I used to deal with in the 90s.   It was good to meet up with some old acquaintances and to explore where our industry is going ~ it was also nice to be able, at last, to d it authentically.

The one thing I did't enjoy was the travel, The timings meant that I had to hit the London rush hour joining in with the frantic commute; there is no way I would willingly go back to that as a daily routine.

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