Re:The Disappearance of the Ashtray
by relwin on Monday January 23, 2023 @10:18PM
(#34498696)
I shared an office with a smoker back in the day -- one or two smoking visitors would leave a cloud hanging for an hour.
About 10 years later (several years into the smoking ban in the U.S. workplace) went on a business trip to Japan where all the smokers at work were confined to a small "smoking lounge." You couldn't see their faces through the window due to the thick smoke!
Nowadays I can easily smell someone smoking a block away. It's kinda the same reaction as when a vintage 60's car putts by trailing unburned hydrocarbons...
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Re:The Disappearance of the Ashtray
by themodelplumber on Monday January 23, 2023 @10:24PM
(#34498743)
You ever see the plastic furnishings on those old Japanese business flights that allowed smoking? P h e w
My first computer programming jobs, everybody smoked. Our ADM-3A terminals had cigarette burns on them.
Just missed that. They had been confined to the smoking room however. It stank so badly I brought my own keyboard and mouse in which could not be touched ok penalty of death and a fat can of air freshener.
I used to travel around the world upgrading software and hardware in computer rooms. In one place people smoked in the computer room - because their boss did, so they ignored the ban too. In that one computer room the hard disks had to be reformatted approximately once every two or three months, due to errors (and that would update the internal sector error list so that the disk could continue to function). This never happened anywhere else, the equipment was exactly the same everywhere but disks didn't fail at the other sites. Can't be sure but the only difference with that site was that people smoked in the computer room (those disks weren't airtight).