21 Comments
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Andrew Smith's avatar

The LDAP shirt is fantastic. I miss innocent inside jokes like that! Nerds have so many.

I have a weird relationship with T-shirts I'll have to break down for you some time, but lately I've been wearing T-shirts tied to specific people. I lost 2 friends last year, and each has a shirt now. Same with older memories of living friends. There's a lot of potential symbolism there for me.

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

I get that; t-shirts can be oddly personal and take you back to a cool thing or a cool person in your life.

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Patrick Jordan's avatar

Love this one. The history the t-shirts, all of the LDAP goodness that takes me back to the early days of Active Directory. My favorite t-shirt - right now, reserving the right to change - is a Gary Clark Jr concert tee from seeing him live in a super cool, small outdoor venue in 2019. No opportunities to talk about LDAP, but a spectacular show.

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Funny I didn't think of concert tees but it makes total sense! Like brewpub shirts —signposts to where you heard good music (or drank good beer)

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Patrick Jordan's avatar

My "favorite" old school tech shirt was from Microsoft. Was working a company that Microsoft contacted out call center tech support to, for Windows and Office. My first ever tech job. They told us we'd be getting Microsoft Windows polos and our team was psyched. The morning arrived where we were all unboxing them and they were really nice quality black polo shirts. Only one problem with them - Microsoft Windows was rendered in black on the black shirt. So the bit we were gonna show off was damn near invisible.

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

That's classy tho

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Daniel Gmyrek's avatar

My favorite, I pull it out in my history of pharmacy course when I cover the Middle Ages

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Daniel Gmyrek's avatar

Well, the picture didn’t link. Black Death world tour t-Shirt

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Ahha! I see what you did there 😁

my doc prescribed a thing for me that Kaiser couldn't fill and had to go to a 'compounding pharmacy.' My 1min research on the internet led me to believe that's what every pharmacy used to be?

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Daniel Gmyrek's avatar

Up until the 1960’s even the chain drugstores would compound just about anything. In the early 1970’s, when I was in college, compounding was a core component of the curriculum. The chains started to eliminate all but the simplest compounding, leaving it to the independent drugstores. Some of these evolved into compounding specialty pharmacies. Many even do sterile products.

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Yep Compounding Specialty pharmacy is where I ended up

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Albert Cory's avatar

LDAP also means “Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.”

At Google, asking “what’s your ldap?” was a standard question if you met someone new and wanted to stay in touch.

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Can't believe I just got out-geeked

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Albert Cory's avatar

anecdote: On Shoreline Blvd, I once got into a 3-way crash (not at all serious) with 2 other Googlers.

We didn’t exchange names or insurance information; we just said “what’s your ldap?”

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

I am trying to think of a MSFT equivalent and I'd have to say alias. OG email alias' were some bastardized ver of your first+last name courtesy of IT and MSFTies would often adopt them as nicknames and monikers. Like billg. Mine was asnider, meh.

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Richard J Bennett Jr's avatar

I have one that reads on the front "ucla sucks", and on the back "but Stanford swallows". Sadly, it's been packed away and missing for over 2 decades now

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Dude I remember that one—it was a conversation starter, you must find.

Also Just Say YO!

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Richard J Bennett Jr's avatar

That one came to my mind too!

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Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

For a minute, I thought that t-shirt was going to take me back to that t-shirt and then my phone would explode in a recursive flurry

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🅟🅐🅤🅛 🅜🅐🅒🅚🅞's avatar

As long as it took you on a journey, cause that’s what matters… (Loved the band Recursive Flurry!)

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