The story of my Java shirt

I wore my Java shirt to work today. It's just a black T-shirt with the logo you can see on the right printed on the shirt. After someone commented on how they liked it, I told them the story of how I got it. As I told the story, I thought it sounded funny. I'm writing it down here so I don't forget it. As you can see, I'm my own biggest fan!

In case you don't know, Java is a programming language developed at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995. There was a lot of excitement about it and I was one of the people interested in it. Every year, I would go to the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston to keep up with what is new in computer systems that are embedded in small things (that's what our company does - make small computers that fit into small places and record information about them or control them in some way). Sun originally developed Java for embedded systems and I was interested in hearing more about it at the conference.

Sun was presenting a number of sessions on Java and I went to one. After the talk was over, they started handing out T-shirts with the Java logo and I wanted one. Badly. But by the time I got to the front of the room to get one, they had run out of shirts. They said they were going to have more for the next talk so I'd have to wait. In the meantime, I ran into some friends at the conference who used to work at our company and one of them had one of the T-shirts. I HAD to get a T-shirt now!

Finally, the time for the next talk came around and I sat through it making sure to be near the door where they would be handing out the shirts. It was the same talk I'd sat through before so all I had to occupy my mind was how I was going to wear that shirt to work the next day. After the talk was over, they announced that they still didn't have the new box of shirts. Could I wait to sit through the talk again? Outside, I ran into my friends again and one of the other guys now had the Java T-shirt! I was going nuts now. I kept checking back at the Sun booth but they either didn't have the shirts or I'd just missed the talk and would see people coming out with their T-shirts.

I went home that night with no T-shirt. But a few days later, I got a package in the mail. It was one of the Java T-shirts my friends had gotten at the conference! What nice guys they are. So, I bought them a pound of Kenyan AA coffee and sent it to their office as thanks. If I would have thought more about it, I would have bought Sumatran coffee (grown on the island next to Java in Indonesia) but I've always thought Kenyan is the best and I thought they deserved it.