Today is the first working day after the long Christmas holidays. I have to drag my reluctant self out of bed and drive to work this morning. The office is quite quiet, since many people are still enjoying their extended vacation. I spent the morning walking around and chatting with friends. Someone said I look younger than usual today. I figured that it must be my new clothes. Pat always complain my clothes are really out of fashion, so she forced me to get some new clothes during the boxing week sales. Another friend agrees that we don’t need better looking clothes, we are engineers after all. Luckily his wife take care of buying his clothes, but Pat try to make me pick my clothes myself.

I found buying clothes, especially fashion, give me most headache. I can check out at the specification and buy sport clothings without any hassle. However there is not objective set of guideline help me to select fashions. Somehow, Pat thinks that my pick of clothes always does not good, but it seems alright to me. Taste is something that engineer cannot handle. Fashion magazine is useless, since the description about the fashion of the season is so vague that it does not provide any useful information. To make it worse, it is impossible to generalize the clothing photos in the magazine to deduce a trend. The clothing styles are hopeless confusing and contradictory with each other. I wonder, maybe there is a niche market to publish a fashion magazine, more like a buyer’s guide of fashion in disguise, targeting engineers. The magazine only need to have a few selection of clothes from a few major fashion labels in each price range. Limiting the choice to the most popular one will make the selection easier. It is wise to leave the task of picking clothings to the fashion experts. Then the engineers can spent their time in picking other things they are good at, such as computers, tech gadgets, cars, hi-fi etc. This is called the division of labor, which increase the productivity of everyone.