Shorts in the Office???

When I signed onto the computer tonight, the first article that met my eyes was about a polar bear romance - love at first sight. The second was about wearing shorts to work. At first, the article be seemed to be saying that shorts do not belong in the office. No more so than flip flops and belly shirts. But then it went on to say that Daisy Duke shorts are inappropriate but that a nice pair of Bermuda shorts is okay. Are any kind of shorts in a professional office okay? NOT in my office. I'm not assuming. I know. I know because I was in my boss's office a couple weeks ago when the CEO called and told him to tell one of our employees that if she wears shorts again to the office, don't bother to show up. If I'm lyin' I'm dyin'. Coincidentally, my boss and I stayed late after work tonight discussing guess what? Proper dress for the office. Why? Because today one of our employees wore an extremely short skirt. While that's not quite as serious an infraction as the shorts - even though the shorts were longer and more circumspect and looked more professional as they were nice tailored shorts - it is an area of concern. Someone mentioned the short skirt to my boss. Luckily it wasn't the CEO or the HR Director who noticed the short skirt this time. Yep, THIS TIME. This employee who wore the short skirt (not the same person who wore the shorts) has been warned before, officially in HR at that, to dress more circumspectly. For awhile, she dressed more appropriately for the office. Now she's regressing. My boss and I talked for awhile about this. We can't tell our departmental staff to wear "professional" dress. We have two employees that wear gym shoes daily - per doctor's orders. And thus they dress demurely, but not in professional office attire. A lot of the others dress casually quite often. We're willing to live with office casual. We can't live with employees who wear skirts so short you can see everything when they bend over or who show a lot of cleavage. Yeah - I know. This sounds strange, maybe even ha ha funny, coming from an erotic romance writer. And yeah, this is the same erotic romance writer who wrote a story in a nudist colony last summer where no one wore clothes throughout most of the book. I'm also the erotic romance writer who had a vampire romance come out today where the vampires have big orgies. So call me Sibyl. I have two very different sides - the day job office side and then the erotic romance writer side. If you work in a professional office, are you allowed to wear shorts? Short skirts? Do you think people should be allowed to wear such things? You'll also want to see what Amarinda Jones, Anika Hamilton, Anny Cook, Barbara Huffert, Brynn Paulin, Bronwyn Green, Dakota Rebel, Kelly Kirch, Molly Daniels, Sandra Cox, Regina Carlysle, and Cindy Spencer Pape are up to, so make sure to visit them also. :)