The Nude Is Usually Someone Who Looks Better Dressed
The number of office workers across the country who suddenly throw off their clothes and run about among their colleagues has grown dramatically in recent months. Psychologists are scrambling to explain the behavior and office managers are struggling to cope with it.
The central question: How do you get a nude employee to put his or her clothes on and get back to work?
“I wish I understood this and could find a way to stop it,” said the supervisor of a telephone call center in Omaha where more than 1,000 people work side by side in small cubicles.
“Everything will be going along hunky dory and then suddenly you hear shouting. Someone is running down an aisle stark naked,” she said. “Almost always it’s someone who definitely looks better with clothes than without clothes.”
Psychologists who have studied this new twist in cubicle behavior say it is too simplistic to blame overcrowding or drudgery of boring, repetitive tasks.
“We’ve seen this in insurance claims processing offices, in telephone call centers and even in at an Internal Revenue Service facility,” said Amy Weinstein, a Nashville psychologist who studies workplace behavior and advises country music stars.
“I thinks it’s too simplistic to blame overcrowding or boring work or alienation caused by illegal immigrants and the Bush Administration,” she said. “Something more profound is at work, global warming, perhaps.”
Not all the experts see spontaneous workplace nudity as bad.
“If we could get postal workers to throw off their clothes and run about screaming instead of opening fire with an assault rifle, that would be real progress,” said a New York psychologist, who asked not to be identified because he advises Mayor Michael Bloomberg on anti-terror matters.
Once the clothes are off, how do you get the employee to put them back on?
“I’ve probably talked to a hundred office managers about this very question,” Weinstein said. “The emerging consensus seems to be that you have to step in front of the nude worker and hold up a full length mirror. It’s a kind of shock therapy.”
She said a crucial second step is to then immediately throw a blanket over the offender.
Weinstein and a fellow psychologist said they plan to begin marketing soon an Emergency Office Nudity Recovery Kit.
“The EONRK is a tall, thin cabinet that you will hang on the walls of your workplace,” Weinstein said. “Inside will be a light weight full-length mirror, a blanket and some smelling salts.”