High and Dry

David Tufaro would like you to keep his dry cleaner in business.

Here is his letter to the Baltimore Sun this week:

Who would even have thought that your neighborhood dry cleaner would be suffering? Mine is down 70% in business. My advice: While working from home, please dress as though you were going to work.

And remember, you never know when your child, grandchild, or grandparent might be calling on FaceTime. So by all means, wear clothes.

If you don’t know who David Tufaro is, certainly Baltimore readers do. He is a highly successful developer who ran for mayor once. Unsuccessfully. As an extremely well-to-do member of Baltimore’s business elite, his concern about dry cleaners somehow rings a little Marie Antoinette to me. Or maybe more along the lines of Frasier and Niles.

On the other hand, dry cleaners are real people who run small businesses that are probably devastated by this crisis, so perhaps I would do well to focus on them and try to tune out Mr. Tufaro. At the time he wrote the letter, dry cleaners were still operating. Have they been shut down now as non-essential?

I wonder if Mr. Tufaro has a plan to support them.

Before I get too convoluted in my analysis of this letter, there is one last clue available: the date of publication. It ran in the April 1st edition of the Baltimore Sun. Perhaps Mr. Tufaro is just having a good laugh about it all? Hard to say.

How about you? If you are working from home, are you getting dressed in business attire each day? If you are not working, are you getting dressed? No need to send photos. I’ll take your word for it.