Overall in general
There are so many fashionable all-weather products on store shelves these days, and some are even on sale before Santa Claus arrives. As a victim of the advertisement, I ended up picking up clothes from that product category. The jacket still remained on the shelf after I started to ponder the meaning of the word all-weather for nothing / unnecessarily to ponder the meaning of the word all-weather. I mean, with common sense you’d interpret it to mean that it works in every kind of weather, right?! Apparently not everything can be figured out with common sense, nor should you overthink it.
Once again, expectations are high for the kind of weather where you get to buy or dig out the right winter clothes from storage. Some climate experts say there’s no such thing as climate change, except between people’s ears. Elsewhere it was stated that the year had been the warmest of the century, and my own feelings support that. There has been change. Or then the climate hasn’t changed, but the weather has been acting up. At times the summer felt like the tropics. Now we’re already living through a second autumn that feels like an island nation. This topsy-turviness will soon make left-hand traffic feel appropriate, too.
Last year’s winter coat purchase ended up being used not only in the fitting room but on one more wintry occasion, when the product proved too warm for a biting four degrees below zero. I should have wisely gone for the all-weather option so it would have seen more use.
For small children, the conditions for outdoor play are overall-weather all the time. They’ve got it easy! Originally, the idea of an overall was a coverall, meant to protect the wearer’s other clothes.
This childish wordplay is a good place to end with a serious observation: the future of workwear is likely to be strongly all-weather as well. The enstex surface, originally familiar from children’s clothes, held its own in all conditions and the worker got the job done. Now, however, truly all-weather conditions call for new solutions. Climate change is real elsewhere too, not just in ad copy.
I’m still waiting for those childhood winters when everything seemed very clear-cut, the weather included. We wore overalls in every kind of weather.
Still, the world changes and the customer is always right.
Waiting for overall weather to return.
