[TUHS] "Oregano" and Unix wizards

William Pechter pechter at gmail.com
Sat Nov 4 06:02:19 AEST 2017


Another thing that comes to mind was my late wife's roommate when she
was a contractor at either Bell Labs, AT&T or Bellcore back in the
late 80's to 1990 or so...

There was a rumor about undercover Narcotics cops inside the facility
going through desks and such at night.
Her officemate, who was a non-drug user -- but concerned about civil
liberties and privacy put two plastic bags of unknown substances in
his desk.

One leafy substance named catnip -- containing catnip.  One powdery
substance labeled sugar (which if I remember correctly was some kind
of confectioners sugar.

Shortly after that the substances disappeared from his drawer...  ( I
think some personnel did shortly after that as well.)

I can imagine the results of the lab tests coming back.  Perhaps this
info ran wide enough that some folks remembered this incident.

Bill
--
  d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN.  Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
 pechter-at-gmail.com


On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 3:21 PM, Ralph Corderoy <ralph at inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> The only thing that isn't obviously some sort of pun on an aspect of
>> Unix is a canister labeled Oregano in the foreground of the picture.
>
>     https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.unix.wizards/qkiqSJWgEPE/E5BwZYMvXwAJ
>     The oregano is reputedly referring to an incident in which one of
>     the original folks involved with BSD was hassled for coming across
>     the Canadian/U.S. border with a bag of what was assumed to be an
>     illegal substance, and turned out to be oregano.
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.
> https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy



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