Suit of the Week: Brooks Brothers

91 Comments

1. Love the pants on this suit. Finally some classic trousers.

2. Is there a way to shop for insurance online without talking to anybody? I should probably get an umbrella policy and maybe could find a cheaper option for car insurance, it’s like 3x what it was when first got it.

   1. I used PolicyGenius for my homeowners insurance

   2. RLI. You can do it online.

   3. Lemonade for auto, if they’re in your area.

3. Please send me good vibes…I have a presentation to my agency’s legal team in about a half hour (I’m not a lawyer, I’m a subject matter expert).

   1. You got this!

   2. Good luck! You’ll be great :)

   3. Good luck!

      Lawyer here who works with non-lawyers all day: I LOVE when people are experts in their own areas and are willing to educate our team.

4. If not your phone, what do you use to listen to music? I wish iPods were still available.

   1. I still use my old ipod nano, it’s great for working out or when I don’t want to deal with my phone.

   2. Oh man, am I ever old school! I listen to CDs on my Bose CD player; I listen to music on Sirius XM in my car. I don’t listen to music when I am walking outdoors (for safety reasons), nor when exercising indoors, just never got in the habit.

   3. At home, my Alexa! (My ex had really good Sonos speakers) but of course it is streaming from your phone so maybe I’m not understanding the question fully.

   4. I just bought my daughter an mp3 player. I want her to have some choice in when she wants to listen to music but I can still control what she downloads from Spotify and turn off the internet.

      All that to say, there are mp3 players out there similar to iPod touches. I wish they still made those.

   5. I’m a musician so I still have an old school stereo system with CD player, record player, tape player and very high quality speakers. I have a huge music collection. I also use Alexa devices sometimes out of laziness which I have attached to high quality speakers. I just ask Alexa to play a radio station or podcast or whatever. And I have very good speakers with my desk computer so I listen there too.

      The quality of my cell phone speakers is terrible and I hate to use that. I also have nice Bluetooth headphones that conduct via bone (Shokz) that I like. They don’t cover my inner ears so they are safe to use outside where you need to be aware of surroundings.

      1. I want your set-up, as I still have some cassette tapes and vinyl LPs from my misspent youth that I’d like to listen to again. I’ll have to seek out a vintage hi-fi enthusiast/repair shop to fix an old compact cd/tape system I still hung onto.

   6. I listen to Spotify on my computer when I’m in the office.

      Legit saw a guy on the street with a cassette Walkman and headphones this week. Made me nostalgic.

5. Question that should be fun for this group: who is the new “millionaire”? The average millionaire does X, the millionaire next door, “one meeeeelllion dollars,” etc. How much is impressive and/or you can pack it up and go home if you hit that milestone? 5? 10? I’m curious what people think.

   1. $50,000,000 or more?

      1. tough crowd lol

         I read somewhere that $30M was something – what private wealth advisors work with, maybe?

         1. Enough to build generational wealth? That’s the big milestone people start to think about once they hit $5-$10MM – can I hand down enough to provide a legacy for my children and grandchildren.

   2. Man, I still think 1 is a big accomplishment! My husband and I are ~90th percentile earners and good savers and we only recently crossed the 1 million mark and that includes home equity. We still aren’t at $1M if you exclude our house.

      But to answer your question I think I’d feel very set at $5M. I can’t imagine needing more than that even with potentially big end of life expenses.

   3. So “How to Marry a Millionaire” was a 1953 movie, and at the time representing landing on very cushy easy street. Based on nothing but inflation, that’s around $11M today.

      Seems about right – enough not to have to worry about expensive care in old age, to experience many luxuries, etc but not the kind of crazy money that you can throw around on yachts and jets and mansions and armies of staff.

      1. The 3% rule would allow you to pull $330K per year from that $11M. Take-home would depend on whether you were paying regular income tax, capital gains tax, or no taxes (Roth?), but that would be a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle in most places.

         1. Um, that is comfortably the top 10% nearly everywhere, and maybe only slightly lower than that in the absolutely highest cost of living places (NYC and San Francisco). My salary is 1/3 that in the DC area and I’m comfortably upper middle class.

   4. If we had 5M invested I would retire and live frugally. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll hit that before retirement.

      1. Don’t feel too bad. Almost no one hits that.

   5. Back in the 90s, investment bankers wanted to make their dime and then leave. What is the equivalent now?

6. Is a false positive on a COVID test several days after getting the vaccine a thing? My husband appears to have a faint positive and he just got the booster on Sunday. He didn’t have any known exposures since then, but had wondered whether someone at a Labcorp he went to was sick the previous Friday. We mask indoors everywhere because I’m high-risk and pregnant – so we’re having trouble pinpointing this.

   1. Are you sure he masks indoors when you aren’t around? I’d guess it was an exposure while at work or something

      1. 100% sure. He’s more cautious than I am.

         1. Very interesting, congrats! I’ve recently learned that a lot of people keep secrets like that from their spouse, you’re very lucky to have a good one.

            1. This is very interesting! I’ve also always assumed anyone who contracts an endemic, airborne, and mostly harmless virus has committed some secret sin against the woke religion!

            2. Woke religion? I hope you catch long COVID.

            3. Huh? Are you ok, anonymous @4:23pm?

            4. It’s luck to meet a great candidate for a spouse, but marriage is a choice. Having a great spouse isn’t “lucky.”

            5. This whole set of responses is bonkers.

   2. I would not count on the test being a false positive. Take the precautions you’d take if he has Covid.

      1. And no the vaccine won’t cause a positive test. The tests are looking for active virus, not antibodies.

   3. No. He has Covid.

      1. And fwiw I wouldn’t assume he lied to you. My parents caught covid while wearing KN95 masks. It happens. But yeah he’s got Covid. The vaccine does not cause false positives.

         1. I also caught COVID while wearing a properly fitted mask. And a lot of people don’t wear the KN95 masks effectively.

         2. lol yeah I’m not at all worried that my husband lied to me. I’m worried about harming my baby and about my ability to survive an infection.

   4. The vaccine doesn’t have full effect for about two weeks, so your husband probably unfortunately was exposed shortly before or after the vaccine, which did not have the full effect yet. Hopefully he has access to Paxlovid and can start taking it right away, and do all the things you’re supposed to do to mask up and isolate per current CDC guidance.

      1. Even if the vaccine was at full effect it’s totally possible to get Covid. It mainly makes illness less severe.

         1. Yes, correct! I was getting more at the implication that getting a vaccine would mean any positive test soon thereafter should be false because if you’ve been vaccinated, that would prevent infection, which it wouldn’t.

   5. Did he look at the test more than 15 minutes after starting it? The tests aren’t reliable if you let them sit around.

   6. Incredibly, astronomically unlikely. As in if it did happen, I’d like to write a case report about it. The mRNA vaccines tend to stay pretty localized to the injection site but do spread a tiny bit into the circulation, so in an astronomically unlikely situation, it could have potentially happened, though it’s more likely that there was a lab screwup than a false positive.

      I looked it up out of curiosity- assuming he got the pfizer vaccine which is 10ug of mRNA, 24 hours after injection, concentration of the mRNA vaccine in plasma could be about 33fg/ml (based on the numbers in Hasset et al. Molecular Therapy 2024). Estimating a 10fold loss going from blood to nasal swab gets you to 3femtogram per ml which is pretty low- PCR testing usually has a sensitivity limit of 0.5micrograms per ml.

      If he received a protein vaccine (the novavax one) or took an antigen test (i.e. one of the home test kits with the colored lines), I’m going to say absolutely not.

   7. Ugh, thanks all. All of our precautions feel pointless af.

      1. If it makes you feel any better, we have been 100% effective at avoiding household transmission during three separate cases of COVID by isolating the sick person in a room with an air filter.

         1. Us too.

         2. Same. Sleep separately, masks in common areas and no overlap in those areas. Air filter going.

         3. Same. Being a stickler about not breathing into each others’ air has kept it limited to one person In our house several times now.

      2. I’m sure it’s frustrating. Precautions are really important but they’re not 100%. Your husband, unfortunately, likely has COVID, and the two of you should proceed with that in mind.

         1. We definitely are (isolating, etc.) I meant the precautions to avoid it in the first place.

            1. Yeah, I know. And I’m sorry — it must be so frustrating, and to be pregnant and high-risk and dealing with it….all to say, I’m sure you’ll all be okay (we have also avoided household transmission with isolation and an air filter), but I’m just acknowledging that this sucks.

      3. It is incredibly frustrating that even though masks are more effective when also used for source control, workers and patients in places like Labcorp and every place I know where the vaccines are administered are not consistently masking, and we have to rely on our masks alone.

         There have been multiple studies concluding that it’s better to be infected with less virus than with more virus, so it’s still thought to be better to be infected while masking than when unmasked. I’m sorry it’s stressful having to try to prevent spread at home (people do succeed at this, if it helps to know).

      4. It is incredibly frustrating that even though masks are more effective when also used for source control, workers and patients in places like Labcorp and every place I know where the vaccines are administered are not consistently masking, and we have to rely on our masks alone.

         There have been multiple studies concluding that it’s better to be infected with less virus than with more virus, so it’s still thought to be better to be infected while masking than when unmasked. I’m sorry it’s stressful having to try to prevent spread at home.

      5. It may feel pointless, but your chance of catching any viruses or other germs remains lower when you still mask, so I wouldn’t throw all caution out. Covid in pregnancy is no joke, so please feel encouraged to continue to be careful. It is not your or your husbands fault.

         FWIW, my whole family is vulnerable and we all (including kid) mask indoors with N95 (3M Auras) or KN94/Flomask (kid). We have not had Covid as far as we know (and we test A LOT).

         For those moments where we can’t mask indoors (e.g. obligatory work dinners, ugh), we have tried to control our environment to the extent possible, for example, by sitting by an open window, avoiding people who are visibly sick, masking when going to the restaurant bathroom etc. We dodged Covid several times, which may have been sheer luck or “proof” that those measures work. People may disagree what degree of caution is reasonable or feasible, but that’s what we’ve been doing.

         And still, my kid caught a nasty cold from a neighborhood kid when playing outside – it’s not Covid at least per multiple rounds of testing.

         All that to say, no protection is 100% bullet proof especially with the levels of Covid and other sickness that’s going around right now and the general state of things (*waves hands around*) in this regard.

      6. You don’t know how many other cases of COVID your precautions have saved you from. Probably several.

   8. What do you care. He’s vaxed. You’ll be fine.

      1. This isn’t correct; vaccinated people frequently spread infection. That’s kind of the entire problem with the pandemic response summed up.

7. Sending love to all our friends in Florida who may be getting hit by Milton. Stay safe everyone <3

   1. Thank you!

8. My company (global player, almost 100k employees worldwide across many different sites and campuses) just announced 3 days a week back in the office at the campus I am assigned to.

   I don’t have an issue with this in general, but in the case of me and my coworker, we are the only ones on a team of 15 who are in this specific location – the main other North American location where my manager and the rest of the team is based is a 5-6hr trip by plane.

   All our work is global, meeting virtually with colleagues in Europe and on the West Coast, starting as early as 6am EST and going as late as 7-8pm EST. My work falls into a confidential area of business so I’d be sitting in a closet-sized windowless room at least for half of the day anyways since I can’t take calls in the hot-desking open area.

   My coworker and I joined that team just a few months ago after a big reorg (we survived that one), and we had local management pre-Covid, but not since 2020.

   I swear if they start to monitor presence via keycards and punish people like me over this BS, I am out. At the same time as coming with this initiative, the company is mandating extreme cost savings so we don’t go on more than one overseas work trip a year to build relationships as a global team – yet they want to push commuting costs to all employees, to justify their offices not sitting empty. And all this despite our business delivering growth in a tough market over the past few years of remote work.

   My millennial perimenopausal self is raging. I will feel out my manager’s take on this, but am I right to feel irritated by the tone of this company email that’s ordering us all back regardless of whether it makes sense or not?

   1. I’d be out unless they made an exception, no question. I’m not sitting in a windowless room on Zoom to make some RTO Nazi happy.

   2. There’s no way I, here on the internet, can give you feedback about whether you’re justified to be angry over the email’s tone. It does sound, however, like you’re leaping ahead to some really bad conclusions and getting preemptively angry about them, before you know what the situation will actually be.

      What is it that you’d like your manager to give you permission to do?

   3. I’d talk to your manager before getting any further annoyed. Corporate isn’t going to put a bunch of asterisked footnotes in a comm like that.

   4. Can you get a difference office space for you and the other team member? Like a different ‘on site’ location?

   5. No one ever said WFH would be permanent, and I don’t think getting mad that the pandemic is so under control that your employer wants you back in the office is very productive. 3 days a week sounds reasonable; large tech companies near me have all gone back at least that much.

      1. I just wish we could use the lessons we learned during the pandemic, including the ways being in-office can be counterproductive for some (and it sounds like that’s true for the poster). We shouldn’t do things the way we did just because that was how it was.

         1. Or even everything we learned about CO2 levels and cognition! A windowless small room for hours doesn’t sound like optimal ventilation.

      2. It is ridiculous to demand an employee who doesn’t work with any local employees go into the office to take zoom calls three days a week when that employee could easily take them from home. I don’t support business decisions that don’t make any logical sense and you shouldn’t either.

         1. They are paying you. They can demand anything they like. “Demanding” a worker actually come to the office. The nerve.

            1. They can’t, actually, because they’re not employing slaves.

            2. Paying someone doesn’t equate to demand anything they like — what an attitude!

            3. This seems like a wildly uneducated opinion.

         2. And this was ridiculous before the pandemic. I remember one notorious company doing this to a bunch of staff when they moved headquarters: forcing people to come in and work alone in empty rooms, even if they’d previously been set up to do remote work when coordinating with teams in other locations. Yes maybe it was a way to try to make senior staff miserable so they would quit.

      3. Yeah, the resistance to three days a week in the office sounds more bonkers to me than the policy. And I would expect monitoring and consequences but that’s not unusual. The permanent work from home and empty offices, that’s unusual and going away. You can quit in a huff over it but I wouldn’t expect a different outcome elsewhere.

   6. Honestly, 3 days a week doesn’t sound so bad. I know a few people who have been in the office three days for a year or two and a few others who are in the office 5 days a week. I know it’s not ideal, but you can either accept it or find another job. I feel like some companies are instituted RTO to get people to quit.

   7. Can you still do flexible work on the office days? For me it makes a big difference to commute around rush hour for example. Anyway you could do something like that or schedule to office luncheons for your days there?

   8. I’d take the tone as just corporate and not bother feeling irritated unless I have other gripes with leadership, but I would be optimistic that of course this nonsense wouldn’t apply to me personally. That’s how it’s gone for me so far and I think not expressing irritation only helped.

      1. I think this is a good take, thank you.
         I have calmed down and will just inform my manager that this email was sent from my campus leadership and that I’m assuming it doesn’t really apply.

9. Last year, the wise hive recommended Halloween-themed, pop-it keychains from the river store as a good thing to give out to trick or treaters – they were a huge hit last year so I’m wondering if they are still “cool” or is there some other non-candy item that’s more popular this year?

   1. I am not up on trends of any sort, so take this with a grain of salt. But I buy sheets of temporary tattoos and sheets of fake mustaches, cut them up, and put those out (along with candy). They’re always a hit, plus any left over can be put out the following year.

      1. Source?

         1. What? Source for what? Do you mean where do I buy these things? I usually go to Target, but just google.

   2. Pop-its are still huge with my first and third graders and their friends.

   3. Just say amazon

      1. Seriously…

      2. This myth that you can’t will apparently never die.

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