The atmosphere of nakedness

Our hot water boiler is out for the entire building. This means 13 units are spending their evenings trying to find friends with showers, gyms, work or running up and down the stairs with pots of water pioneer style. I told my coworkers this and they tell me to use the shower here.

This sounds reasonable enough right? It's a nice shower they put in over the summer in the hopes we might do some damned exercise during the day. (I think) Or possibly to accomodate all the cyclists. But I fear the work showers.

They aren't used very much. Most of the cyclists here change their clothes, or don't get sweaty enough to want to bathe during the day. And there's a healthy bias against nakedness at work. Do you want to think about your coworkers in the all together? I think not. And do most coworkers go in the nude at all at work? Unlikely unless you have a profession that demands it. The additional problem is location, the showers are directly above our production floor. A part of me will think "there's a fixture that someone is building down there and I am naked."

The other and most important thing is what I've dubbed as the atmosphere of nakedness. Gyms have it, yoga studios have it, school locker rooms have it, pools have it but the work showers do not have it. There simply have not been enough naked people at work to create the expectation someone would be in their birthday suit hovering precariously above manufacturing. There just isn't.

So instead of using the work showers, I will instead go down to 24 Hour fitness, which has a finely tuned and adjusted atmosphere of nakedness.