That Dress Code Is Cutting It Close

When I was in the fire academy, the women’s dress code said that hair had to be worn in a neat bun. I had layered, shoulder-length hair, so it was difficult to keep it up neatly all day long. The shorter pieces would stick out of the bun, or fall out around my face, and my bangs weren’t long enough to pin back without using an entire bottle of hairspray.

Most of my instructors were understanding and said that as long as my hair was up and my mask could seal to my face, they would consider me to be in dress code. But there was one instructor who said there was no excuse. “We’re a paramilitary type of school, so dress code is extremely important.” She acknowledged that it wasn’t a safety issue, but told me I had to follow it anyway, and that doing my best wasn’t good enough. She wrote me up three times and then called me in for a meeting to inform me that another write-up for the same issue would get me expelled from the program.

I looked into the dress code and saw that the men’s hair code was much more lenient. It just said that hair must not touch the collar of the shirt or the tops of the ears.

So, the night after that meeting, I went to a hair place and told the stylist to do whatever she wanted to my hair as long as it fit those requirements. She was stoked and gave me a really cute pixie cut.

The next day, the same instructor tried to write me up, but since I was technically in dress code, she couldn’t.

The next semester, there was a man with long hair who wore it in a bun instead of cutting it, and the following semester, the dress code was rewritten to be gender neutral.