Facial Hair Confusion

As a few of you who have actually seen me in the last month or two know I have been letting my facial hair grow out. In fact I have recently been sporting what Q refers to as the "Grizzly Adams". It started out of pure laziness and figuring that I could sleep a couple minutes longer in the morning, which in turn meant that I could stay up a few minutes later in the evenings. Which in turn meant that I did not actually get any more sleep and was just as tired every morning. Funny how that works. It wasn't meant to be a long term thing, but after a couple of weeks when no one at work mentioned it i decided to let it go. It became kind of an experiment to see at what point someone in my department would say something. Now I did some minor maintenance here and there, but for the most part I let nature take it's course and let it achieve some normal bushiness. After a month people in other departments were starting to say things to me, but my own group stayed quiet. It really got annoying as I found myself constantly stroking it (the beard you pervs). It was like having a pet on my face. I was always giving it attention.


Finally, last week in the Beatdown Meetings someone finally said something. It was one of my coworkers that had relocated to Chicago and hadn't seen me since before the experiment began. My experiment completed I went home that night and shaved my face clean and my head as well. At this point in my follicle life it's not that big a deal to shave your head, but since I had been letting that grow for a couple of months it looked pretty drastic. The next day at the meeting I came in looking completely different. Some of the people there that didn't know me that well didn't recognize me at first. I was amused to see everybody's reactions when for several weeks they hadn't even acknowledged the beard was there.



My former boss used to accuse me of having "facial hair confusion" as I've done this kind of thing before. For me it's about not being scared of change and in fact embracing it. That and because it cracks me up.