deconstructing biases

The past few days have been interesting...while being equally infuriating. I had to attend a mandatory meeting at my place of work on my day off. Fine. I got paid for four hours of straight overtime. The problem is what new shelter-wide legislation was handed down to us at the meeting. First, my dept. is being split in two and merged with Adoptions. Behavior will be its own dept. and receiving and adoptions will now be one big ball of Customer Care. Fine. I'm losing all the awesome behavior experience I would have gotten...but I am gaining the opportunity to directly place shelter pets in new homes.
Then the big ball dropped: a new dress code addendum. No hollow ear jewelry in guaged lobes, no unnaturally colored hair, no more than two earrings per ear, no visible tattoos. I may as well be wearing a head to toe bodysuit. I'm not unfamiliar with strict dress codes, I've never had a job without one. My problem comes in the reasoning behind the change: to be a more professional organization. Because we all know tattoos and big earrings = unprofessionalism. Just like all pitbulls are vicious, right? We work so diligently to educate the public on common falsehoods propagated by the media and the ignorant about things like anti-breedism (thats a new word I just came up with as the animal world's equivalent to racism). Yet, its ok to look down on our own hard working staff members in the same way. Making a blanket assumption that every customer that walks in the door is going to assume we tattooed, purple haired, earring wearing young people could not possibly have an ounce in professionalism in us. Quite the contrary if you look back on who received the most over-the-counter donations and praise for our organization last month...thats right...us inked and dyed front deskers.
We are told the decision is not meant to take away our sense of individuality. We are told we can all be ourselves. We are told we're just following the norm.
To that we say...we won't let this stand, not in a high stress environment where everyday we're reminded to take care of ourselves and spoil ourselves to combat the effects of Compassion Stress and Fatigue.
Next step: present the incongruity of values in the company and how these policies will directly affect the most fragile staff members to the union.
to be continued...

Anyways...on a couple of lighter notes..
This is how he always sleeps..


they got that right...


my two men sharing some carpet time


and when all else fails, just hit this button.