When I was a kid, my father used to bring home random odd bits of swag for corporations and products no normal person had ever heard of. He was an engineer for a paper company, and for the bulk of his career he functioned as the company's de facto construction manager. This meant he was forever receiving branded odds and ends from contractors, equipment companies, and supply vendors. Pens advertising V-BRITE (a bleaching agent used in papermaking), T-shirts for heavy industrial construction contractors, and so on.

One such item was a snapback ballcap branded with the logotype of a company called Safematic, which I think made pressure regulation equipment. (It was bought out by another such firm in the late '90s.) Unlike a lot of branded corporate swag, the Safematic cap was a quality product for what it was--a decent grey corduroy cap rather than a cheap foam meshback, with the branding on a proper patch rather than just screenprinted on the front of the cap itself.

For some reason I took a liking to the Safematic cap when Dad brought it home, sometime in the mid-'80s, and I wore it a LOT. All through high school and for quite a few years afterward, it was one of my go-to hats. It went to WPI with me--probably some folks who knew me there will remember it. It even appears in one of the UF core stories, somewhat improbably having survived into the late 24th century.

IRL, it wore out to a state of unpresentability and was retired sometime in the late '90s, and subsequently got lost in one of a number of moves made between then and 2002. I hadn't thought about it in years, when it randomly happened to cross my mind last night. I plugged some search terms into the interwebs, idly wondering whether I could find a picture of one like it. I reckoned there had been a number of different models over the years Safematic existed, and I was unlikely to find an exact match.

You may, therefore, imagine my surprise when I did, and furthermore that the photo in question was attached to a listing of the item for sale.

Bizarrely, the listing--the only one of its kind that turned up--was not on (POPULAR AUCTION SITE), but in fact some preposterously bougie fashion website. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Emporio Armani, and, uh... industrial corporate swag from the 1980s? I dunno. The Internet, 2022. (This may explain why the mannequin head it's displayed on has that incongruous hipster beard.)

So anyway, uh, yeah! I bought it. What the hell, they only wanted 20 bucks for it.

What a completely random thing to find another one of.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>
>It even appears in one of the UF core stories,
>somewhat improbably having survived into the late 24th century.
>

Maybe the original Safematic cap didn't survive; I can imagine UF-Gryphon taking some effort to either find a replacement, or create a duplicate.

Peter Eng
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Insert humorous comment here.

I’m imagining UF-Zoner, upon hearing that UF-Gryph was missing his hat, would start a Safematic company (it makes safes?) with that logo, and having the company order some swag, and conniving to have Gryph attend a relevant trade show (your office safe is 100 years old! You really need something more modern for your personal files and gameboy cartridges!) just to score a hat “legitimately”

That seems sufficiently chaotic

-Z

---
Remember kids: guns make you stupid, duct tape makes you smart.

>
>That seems sufficiently chaotic

Or, well, he could reach into a pocket at random and pull one of those hats out. Even the original. =)

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

5,000 miles away but at about the same time I also had a cap like that, only with some other logo on I can't remember and in blue. I think it got lost while I was at university.