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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
I went to the dentist the other day. A filling had chipped out and I needed some repairs. I made sure to ask for an afternoon time since I'd probably have trouble making a morning time. It had already taken a miracle or two for me to make last week's 7:30 am routine check up where they found said chipped filling. Odds were against me that I'd be able to work another miracle and make an early morning appointment in consecutive weeks.
A was wearing a UBC shirt that day. No, that's not a typo. Not a University of California Berkeley shirt, but a University of British Columbia shirt. Gold letters on navy blue. Just like UCB. A friend had given it to me a few years ago. Confusing? You bet.
Now for those of you aren't familiar with the most intimate details of my life, I should explain that I like in the San Francisco peninsula. Berkeley is a stone's throw away. Grew up here. I've left a few times for school and for work, but I always seem to find my way back. A lost dog of sorts, just on a longer time scale.
I was leaving the building, the dentist having done exquisite work (so far as I can tell) as usual. I was passing by a guy with a construction hat, clearly part of the remodeling crew working on the boarded up, partitioned off parts of the builing, when he hollered, "Berkeley?"
I misheard him at first. Heard "Dr. Krauss?" (my dentist). I smiled and replied, "Yeah."
Ten seconds later, I immediately realized that he had misread my shirt as UCB and thought I was a Cal student. It's been a good number of years since I'd gotten my paper scroll, but I could probably still pass as a grad student.
The mistake is almost a non-mistake. Some Asian guy walking down the hall of a medical office in an upscale neighborhood wearing a gold-on-blue shirt with a U, a B, and a C is almost always going to be a Berkeley student. Especially if we're only a ten minute drive to Stanford campus. Hell, if I had seen myself walking down the hall, I'd have thought the same thing. A kind of practical joke.
When my friend gave me this shirt, I myself did a double take. The shirt looked exactly what I expected a Berkeley shirt to look like. What I didn't know then was that Berkeley shirts don't say "UCB" on them. They say "Cal". University of California.
Does anyone actually know this without having been a student or staff member there? Even the parents probably don't know this, since this sort of trite knowledge is the exclusive territory of those with ample doses of school pride. I have a gew horribly colored orange shirts to remind me of my own inflated sense of academic self-importance. I no longer have the gall to wear them off campus though, so I guess it wears off once we leave the source of the soul-dying agent.
Clearly, neither the guy or myself have ever been Cal students.
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crossposted from http://www.hkmurakami.com/blog/
 
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Huh, kind of weird, since you grew up in the area. It's always listed as one of the "weird" things Berkeley does to make it self different from the other UCs when people talk about schools (Being called Cal, being the only semester system school in UC system, the only one with Co-Ed Dorm rooms, the only one with co-ed bathrooms, etc, etc,). Then again, the people I usually talked to were a) my friends, who were all competitive about going to college, b) parents of competitive high school students c) people who go to Berkeley
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Yeah in my experience they'd usually just say Berkeley, UC Berkeley, or Cal. Haven't heard many students refer to it as UCB, if at all. Living in the Bay Area, UCB sounds sort of foreign to me, actually. The only time I've heard someone use UCB was on a facebook post talking about where he'd applied to college.
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Isn't there a bank called UCB?
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You should write some blogs about your time in undergrad. I think they'd be interesting to read.
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On June 22 2013 16:37 husniack wrote:
You should write some blogs about your time in undergrad. I think they'd be interesting to read.
Seconded! I've always wondered what goes on there and your personal experiences would be interesting to read for sure in and of themselves :D
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Can't speak for all of SoCal, but for the most part, people here just say Cal or Berkeley. Cal when I usually talk to other students ^^
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Surprisingly, I know about U of Cal shirts. Not even related to me living in UBC's city  I spend too much time on the internet.
You're wearing the right shirt, friend.
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CA10830 Posts
I didn't know that berkeley was called cal until I got to college and saw that we were playing them in football. I grew up in WA tho so maybe I have a bit of am excuse.
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Haha, this always bugged me because Berkeley didn't fit the "pattern" of all the other UC schools. But I guess they have a good reason for it, since they are the original UC campus, after all. It's like how all of the CSI shows have the city in their name except the original show - it's not called "CSI: Las Vegas", it's just "CSI".
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Reading through the blog for me went like this: 1. This guy must not have watched sports growing up 2. This guy must not be from California 3. Oh he grew up and lives in SF, 
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Well, Berkeley is pretty much the only UC that doesn't use the UCXX abbreviation.
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I was a grad student at Berkeley and I didn't know this. Also, I bet at some point they had runs of sweaters or shirts that said UCB on them... right? Probably?
I didn't know you were a Bay Area local Haji... do you ever come to BarCrafts?
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UCB can also be University of Colorado-Boulder. It all gets annoying as hell.
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University of British Columbia is a wonderful school 
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I was accepted into UBC Vancouver, but international tuition is too high T_T I'm going to Keio in Japan instead.
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My Latin professor went to Berkley for grad school. He said there was a mistake in the Latin inscribed on a bridge on campus :p
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At least I don't have to worry about being mistaken for. UBC declined my application so I'm going to SFU (second biggest university (?) In British Columbia). They have a distinct red color and initials I'm sure are not used anywhere else.
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EPT
