I came across this in a local paper. It has not been doctored up. This is exactly how it appears in the full page ad. It clearly illustrates the evolution of man is, in fact, crossdressing… or so it is in the automotive business. Hey – it’s a start, right?

As crossdressing grows in popularity in the automotive business, it will also soon spread to other industries. The business world can be pretty cut throat, with a growing emphasis on the word “pretty”. It’s about time crossdressing entered the mix.

Suit-up, folks… er, make that, skirt-up if you want to climb that corporate ladder. The old school businessman in a suit and tie is going the way of the dinosaur. As they die-off and fall out of power, they’re quickly being replaced by smarter, more innovative people with much better taste in clothes. Make way for a new era of smart, sexy, stylish and powerful corporate leaders known as the businesstrans.

Of course, the ad in the paper refers not to crossdressing, but rather the rise of women in positions of power. Perhaps in time, the ‘businesstrans” will replace the businessman though. Many crossdressers already own their own business. I’ve been in touch with several personally. Of the ones I know, it is the man-side that takes care of the business end of things. Personal appearance still holds a lot of weight in the business world, and today, the prettier side of things is still less attractive in the eyes of many would-be clients. That will change in time though.

For those of you who fall under the category of “businesstrans”, do you take care of (face-to-face) business in guy-mode, or en femme? Where do you see the “evolution of man” going in the business world? I know where I’d my own (business) evolution to go. Whether or not I’m smart enough to pull it off has yet to be determined. What’s in your business future when it comes to gender expression or just feminine fashion?

If your job involves working with others on a regular basis, chances are you get dragged into annoying conversations that you don’t want to be a part of. If not, then perhaps you’re one of the people who drag others into them. Why the Thriller zombie photo? That will make more sense further down.

You know how it works – out of the blue, a co-worker strikes up a conversation about something rather meaningless that you really don’t care to talk about. As much as you want to just walk away or tell them to shut up, you feel obligated to be polite and chat or at least listen. After all, you have to see and work with this person daily and don’t want to cause any hard feelings.

Most workplaces have repeat offenders. We’ve got a few at my office. One of them is so predictable, I often know what he’s going to talk my ear off about before it happens. I also know I’ll have to fake being at least mildly interested in order to keep the peace. The guy I’m speaking of can be an enjoyable person to talk to sometimes, but it’s hit or miss.

With the news of Michael Jackson’s death last Thursday, I knew what was going to be the topic of interest the following day at work and who was going to bring it up first. Friday morning, I entered the office and headed for my desk. Before I could even sit down in my chair, guess who ran over and enthusiastically said, “Hey – have you heard the news…”

“No, I live under a rock on the far side of the moon where radio transmissions can’t reach.”, I replied. Actually, I didn’t really say that, but I sure wanted to. HELLO MCFLY! Anybody in there? He knows full well that I don’t care for celebrity chat because I tell him so every time he engages me in that topic, but it doesn’t matter. Every time one of them dies, gets arrested, or stars in a film he’s interested in, I get to hear about it like it’s some some kind of late breaking, important news flash… and then listen to him repeat the same thing to other employees nearby, one by one.

In all fairness, sometimes I’m the annoying conversation starter. We probably all do that to others from time to time. At least I don’t do it often and repeatedly bother people with trivial things they don’t care to discuss.

My example isn’t of the most annoying conversation I’ve been dragged into but it is extra annoying when you see it coming from a repeat offender. Had someone else (a non offender) brought up the same topic, I may not have been as annoyed. I enjoy occasional meaningless “water cooler” chat, but I do prefer it to be with someone who understands that I have a TV, radio, phone, the internet, etc. and news DOES in fact come my way and I don’t need to be informed about every celebrity death, as if all life hinges on the knowledge, before I can even sit in my chair at the start of the work day.

Do you encounter this at your place of work? Do you ever tell the person to just shut up, or fake being mildly interested until there is opportunity to escape the conversation without appearing too rude about it?

I often tell other crossdressers that I look so different en femme, fully made up, that no one (who knows my man-side) would ever recognize me if they saw. To test this a little, I changed my work-place desktop wallpaper to a close-up of Gabrielle’s face. The photo above is of my dual wide screen 22″ monitors at work. Guess what people are saying…

Several co-workers have seen my new desktop wallpaper in the past two weeks, since changing it to my femme-face. I’ve caught a few of them starring at it (rather than making eye-contact) while talking to me. Oddly, no one has said a word so far. No one has asked who the image is, or smiled in a way that might indicate they know it’s me. I’ve gotten absolutely no comments on the wallpaper image at all.

I’m not quite sure what I’d say if asked. Several stories have run through my mind, from telling them it’s a random image I came across and liked enough to make my wallpaper, to explaining it is a friend of my wife’s (which is fairly true). It’s not a good idea to do this without having a good story worked out to satisfy questions, but I’ve not yet decided what to say should I be asked. I guess I’ll find out if/when that finally happens.

The biggest surprise to me is that no one has questioned why another woman’s face (who is not my wife) is displayed larger than life on my monitors. My co-workers have seen my wife enough to know what she looks like. Perhaps they do think it’s my wife’s face and that it just looks a little different because of the way the image has been processed. Hard to say.

For the record, it is not in my best interest to let people at work know about my feminine side. It might drastically alter the work dynamic between my co-workers and I. There is also a good chance I could find myself unemployed. I wouldn’t get fired for being a crossdresser or anything, it would likely be because I put the wrong cover sheet on my TPS reports or something. ;) That would look better on paper and harder to fight in court.

To the right you can see the photo uncropped and without the blue tint. I tinted it blue because it makes a more visually pleasing desktop wallpaper that way, or so it does for me. I prefer not to have busy wallpapers that make my desktop icons difficult to see in contrast.

If you’re a crossdresser who’s not “out” at work, have you tried anything similar? Perhaps you have a photo of your femme-side hung with your family photos on the wall or sitting on your desk. Or maybe you don’t dare display your softer side at work in any way. Tell me about it.

UPDATE June 21, 2009:
I had to remove the desktop image from my computer at work. Ironically, people weren’t commenting on the image until after I decided to finally write about it. No one recognized the image as me, but I was getting questioned by co-workers about having another woman’s image on my desktop rather than that of my wife’s. I told Mrs. H. about this and she asked that I remove the image, to which I had decided to in light of how people were reacting. She felt funny about people thinking that I might be admiring another woman and I was already getting uncomfortable explaining to people that it was another woman (not my wife). It was an interesting experiment, but I think the desktop location was a poor choice. It gave the wrong impression that I have eyes for another woman outside of my marriage.

This is going to be a pretty senseless post, but it’s not my fault. I blame it on the lack of sleep and amount of caffeine currently in my system.

Sleepless nights really stink, don’t they? We all get them. It’s time to go to bed and there’s just too much running around in the head. I ended up getting maybe an hour or so of sleep in the wee hours of the morning, just before having to wake up to the annoying alarm clock, do my morning work-out (which is oh so fun after having not slept) and get ready for work, etc.

Throw in a really bad traffic jam on the way to work. Tack on an extra hour to my morning drive time. Why? I dunno. Traffic was just moving really, really slow. Didn’t see a single accident and there was no construction going on. About half way to work, I was fully loaded (with pee) but couldn’t do much about it.

By the time I finally arrived at work and relieved my bladder, I was ready to go back to sleep. Sure, can’t sleep all night, but now that I’m at work, my body is all ready for nap-time. Wtf?

I’m not much of a coffee drinker, but I needed some wake-up juice, and so I pounded two cups of hot, black, liquid wake-up in a cup. It didn’t take long to hit me. There I was, sleepy as hell, and wired to the brim! What an odd sensation. I’m not sure why, but I was actually enjoying it today. Everything seemed to be cracking me up… and a co-worker told me that I keep talking to myself, as if I was narrating my day as I went about it. lol

That brings us to the missing payphone above. I had to stop at a local store on break at work, and I walked by the payphone that’s always been there… only today it was not. There’s really nothing funny about it, but as loopy as I was, I started laughing hysterically about the missing phone and felt the need to take a photo of it and share it with you all.

I mentioned it’s just the caffeine induced lack-of-sleep, walking, crossdressing zombie thing, right? Really, I’m not entirely in control of my actions right now… and I kind of like it. This shouldn’t be so fun, but it is.

Someone please tell me you get the same way at times. Lack of sleep + too much caffeine = Ms. Loopy and everything seems outrageously amusing.

I stepped out to buy some flowers for my wife while on break at work today. She’s an amazing woman and I like to bring her flowers from time to time for no other reason other than I love her and to make her smile. Walking back into the office with flowers in my hand always gets the same old, over-used, just-not-funny-anymore joke. Everyone I passed by said pretty much the same thing: “For me? Really, you shouldn’t have!” Seriously, every single co-worker I passed said that same phrase almost word for word. I get this every time I step in the office with flowers in my hand. I always do my polite, fake chuckle back, sometimes playing along. You kind of have to do that. It’s expected, even though the joke, that same old joke, is never funny.

Do you get this in your office? It’s not limited to my walking in with flowers either, there are a lot of repeated, over used, just not funny jokes that fly around. I’ll probably write about others in the future. If any of them were funny the first time I ever heard them… they’re sure not funny now after hearing it a hundred times. But people keep hammering on them over and over. They think they’re being witty and funny, but they’re not witty or funny. Not when it’s the same jokes every time. For a joke to be witty or funny, it has to be somewhat unexpected. These jokes are about as unexpected as the sun setting in the evening.

Don’t get me wrong – I both like and get along really well with my co-workers. I just don’t see the reason for the same stupid jokes each and every time [whatever] repeating situation arises. It’s like when someone burps and someone else replies with a “bless you” or “gazoontite” expecting a laugh because of it. Maybe they keep doing it because everyone keeps offering their fake polite laughs. Maybe it’s just a part of office culture everywhere. I’d be lying if I said I don’t do this myself sometimes, but in all honestly, at least I try to go for the lesser used gags rather than the obvious, already been-beat-to-death ones. Sometimes, I even come up with something genuinely funny and new… and then one of my co-workers will repeat it to everyone else in the office and end up getting wit-credit for MY joke. Grrr. That’s another annoying office trend, and a rant for another day.