Why I Am Stuck Wearing A Hat Again

This is an annoying subject (somewhat amusing though). It is in the category of my hair and grooming related obsessions.

My dad once told me a little story of something he did when he was a kid. He got this little machine that would laminate cards for you. So he laminated his library card.

After he did that, the library wrote a new rule just because of him. It became official: DO NOT LAMINATE THIS CARD. He said it was an honor to be the person who had done something that made them have to write a new rule.

Well, I did something that made them reinforce an existing rule.

I found out a month or two ago that we are allowed to wear a hairnet instead of a hat. I was very happy about that because I HATE wearing a hat. I wished that somebody had told me sooner. So I started wearing a hairnet.

There were no specifications as to what types of hairnets we could wear, what it had to look like, or what kind of object could be defined as a 'hairnet.' If I wanted to I could have tied together a couple pieces of string with big spaces in between them and called it a hairnet. But I decided to just purchase one from a store.

But immediately, the first time I wore it, I KNEW what was going to happen. It was inevitable.

First let me explain about hats and food service.

Hats are a placebo, a superstition, used to protect people against something that doesn't happen, or happens differently when it does happen. Supposedly, the hairs on our heads might spontaneously disconnect, jump off, and land in the food. Hats are supposed to be a mechanical barrier that blocks the hairs when they attempt to jump off your head. As soon as they make the leap, they crash into the hat and rebound back against your scalp and remain trapped between the hat and the scalp, only to suddenly fly off your head in all directions the instant you remove the hat.

Well, that is all a fantasy. Whenever hair actually DOES get in the food, it doesn't jump off your head. Hair can get dragged into food if the piece of hair is attached to your sleeve or your shirt front by static electricity. This will happen if you brush your hair while wearing your uniform, or if your uniform gets hair staticked to it in the laundry dryer, or if your house is a mess and loose pieces of hair are lying around your house. That is why I use a lint roller on my uniform after washing it. My hair is long enough that it would be obvious whose hair it was if I ever got a piece of hair in the food.

The only REAL thing that a hat might possibly do is prevent you from running your hands through your hair. But people are usually smarter than that. A clever, determined person can figure out a way to somehow lift the hat up a little bit and touch their hair underneath it. Since hats are relatively simple to remove and to put back on, it's pretty likely that someone who absolutely had to scratch their head would lift up the hat to do that.

In other words, it is nothing but a placebo put there to reassure people who don't understand the reality of cause and effect and how things happen.

They also sometimes make the guys wear beard guards. This is another ridiculous placebo. Beard hairs as just as unlikely as head hairs to spontaneously disconnect and jump down into the food. Since most people have stubble-length beards anyway, if one hair did fall off it probably wouldn't even be noticed.

It's true, people don't like the IDEA that a piece of hair landed in their food. But in reality, when it happens, it's much more disturbing to have a very long piece of hair than a tiny piece of stubble. People usually just say the whole idea is disgusting in principle, but in reality, there are different degrees of how bad it is.

But the beard guards don't cover all the way up over the mustache or the cheek. For some reason, mustache and cheek hairs don't do the spontaneous-disconnect-and-jump maneuver that chin and jawline beard hairs are able to do.

Also, eyebrow and eyelash hairs don't do that either - only beard hairs located below the line that is covered by the beard guard, and head hairs located above the line covered by the hat. Those head hairs around the edge of the face, and below the line covered by the hat, aren't included. The rule doesn't require you to restrain all those hairs under the hat, so people let the hair puff out freely, and nobody cares. It's only the hairs on TOP of the head that are a problem, apparently.

I could do a little research on dermatology and find out whether those particular areas of skin really do shed hairs freely while the other areas don't.

You COULD have a veil covering your entire head. It would be sort of like a burqa. That might actually be useful. It would block the mouth, which, in my opinion, is much more germ-filled and more likely to actually drool saliva onto the food, or, if someone is malicious, to spit deliberately. That seems worse than a tiny piece of hair falling off. It would also block the nose, so you could sneeze and not worry about it.

Well, so now it's obvious the stupidity, uselessness, and ineffectiveness of the hat-wearing rule.

I knew it was all just a placebo. So when I put on the hairnet, I had to decide what 'image' I would try to create as I placated the government regulators and soothed their irrational fears. Would I use a brightly colored, highly visible, contrasting hairnet, to reassure the customers that yes, there was indeed something preventing the hairs from leaping off into the food? Or would I take my chances, and use a brown-colored hairnet that wasn't very visible, but at least met the minimal criteria of 'just having something on your head?' I chose the not-very-visible brown hairnet.

Sooner or later, I knew someone would say that a barely-visible hairnet wasn't reassuring enough.

Wearing a hat is in the top ten things I hate most about wage slavery jobs. Why do I hate wearing a hat?

-pain and discomfort. The hat presses against my skin, cutting off circulation. Something in the fabric causes a burning sensation on my skin, although that might be because the hat that I'm wearing now is a brand new one. It's also hot. I constantly feel it and can't really forget that it's there.

-visual obstruction. The hat gradually moves further down my head and blocks my eyes so that I can see less and less. I have to push the hat up off my forehead many times every day. I have to wash and dry the hat several times to shrink it enough that it isn't as huge and it stays off my eyes.

-hair loss. I have suspected that hats might be causing me to lose hair around my temples. It could be a coincidence, but my hair started getting thinner and falling out a little bit right after I got jobs that required me to wear a hat. That can happen just because of age, though, so I'm not sure. I was trying to find out whether the hair would get thicker and start growing back if I went a few months without a hat. (I also removed my mercury-silver dental filling, which was another possible cause of the hair loss.)

-useless and ineffective for its intended purpose. I already wrote about that up above.

-social inferiority. In jobs that require people to wear a hat, SUPPOSEDLY to keep hair out of the food, they often don't require MANAGERS to wear a hat, even though those managers will be around the food just like everybody else. This was true at McDonald's, where managers have no hats but the 'inferior' crew members must wear them, and somebody told me it was also true at Papa John's pizza. Somehow, manager-hair doesn't fall off the way crewperson-hair does. Managers' hair magically sticks to their heads. Now, at my current job, the deli managers still have to wear hats like everyone else, so it's not really true here. But in my mind I still remember all the other times when wearing a hat meant that I was the lowliest wage slave.

-physical obstacle. It bonks into things. When I have to crouch down and reach into a tiny little refrigerator I inevitably bonk the hat on the edge of the door or the counter. When I have to clean the fryer or look underneath the table the hat gets knocked off. Sometimes it falls off into the sink when I'm washing dishes and I bend my head downwards.

-it's ugly! I just don't like the way I look with a hat on. I never did. I don't know why, I just don't. It's not me. I feel like a dork. I don't really notice it as badly when everyone else wears them, but I myself don't like how I look with a hat on.

I hate wearing a hat!

I think this happened because of the recent health inspection.

I might have chosen to wear a hat on the day of the inspection. But most of my hats, and a few uniforms, got contaminated with a chemical during one of my incidents. How that happened is another story. When I wore the contaminated hats and uniforms it made me very uncomfortable for hours and hours because of my chemical sensitivity. (This problem once ruined a moment that I would have wanted to enjoy more.) So I just wore my hairnet to work as usual.

The health inspector was 'one to talk.' HE wasn't wearing anything like what you'd expect a health inspector to wear. Instead, he had on this shirt with an open V-neck revealing his chest, saying 'I am a macho stud,' and he had these jeans with embroidered lines on the butt pockets. I haven't seen those embroidered back pockets since, like, the 1980s. He also had earrings. And there's almost always a rule saying guys aren't allowed to wear earrings.

I normally don't mind any of that and I wouldn't have cared at all. I probably wouldn't have even noticed if someone just walked around wearing that particular type of clothing. But he was a health inspector! You're supposed to wear a suit and be all serious and formal if you're a health inspector.

When I saw him I started laughing and was suppressing my laughter the whole time he was walking around. He probably saw my face all red looking like I was going to explode. I mentioned to somebody that I was amused by his unexpected style of clothing. Their answer was, 'Yeah, I know. He's gay!'

But again, I wouldn't mind his being gay. He could be gay, and still dress like a health inspector. But he dressed like a gay guy walking around trying to seduce other gay guys - during a health inspection. I just didn't know what to think of him. I didn't know what to expect.

I started worrying about every little silly thing. During a health inspection, you never know how irrational they are going to be. I worried about the fact that there were dirty dishes in the sink. After all, they already made us keep the middle sink full of rinse water, and the left sink full of soapy water, and the right sink full of sanitizer, so that there wasn't a single sink empty when you needed to drain something out, like the oil in the container of mushrooms for instance, which I just dumped into the 'clean' sink of soapy water, because I had to. If the sinks had to have a perfectionistic setup of soap-rinse-sanitizer, then dirty dishes shouldn't be in the sink at all, interfering with the pristine, perfect beauty of the three sink system. The sink shouldn't actually be USED to wash the dishes. It should just look really pretty. You could take a picture of the sink.

Well, we survived the inspection, but it seems like it was only about a week later that I heard about this new 'no hairnets allowed' rule. And they told me that yes, it was because the hairnet is hard to see, and it LOOKS like you don't have anything on your head at all. It doesn't matter that, in reality, the hairnet is actually THERE. It just has to LOOK like something is there. That proved everything I thought about reality versus placebo.

I knew it would happen sooner or later.

So the great hairnet experiment has ended. I will now walk around, uncomfortable, unable to see, bumping into things, looking dorky, and touching my head more than ever before because I have to constantly readjust the hat for comfort and visibility.

Oh well...