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Comment by IceWreck | Hacker News Reader

Is this real ?

Based on my experience reading TheDailyWTF for a couple years now:

I bet there was indeed a guy at a company who spoke about himself in the 3rd person, took off the lighting bulbs from his office (Masters of Doom talks about something similar, after all), used female names for his variables, and was fired. I would also bet that the "thanks for the tip" part is also true. I'm on the fence about the tea.

Everything else is probably poetic license to help the story flow better.

I don't think someone in the 90s would describe someone else's tea as smelling like kombucha.

Paraphrased in the present, I guess.

How about someone in 2022 describing something taking place in the 90s? That part was not in the dialog taking place in the 90s but the author describing the scene.

Why not? It was a niche hippie/health-nut thing back then, but it was around.

Here's a random article i found from forbes that goes into it a bit: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinatroitino/2017/02/01/ko...

According to my Ukrainian co-worker, back in 90s Kombucha was known as a horrible traditional delicacy similar to surströmming, hákarl or casu marzu.

And yes, I have had a co-worker who drank weird smelly herbal teas and was obsessed with vitamins among other things. And a different one who had a mug that was covered with thick black crust inside and who insisted that it must never be washed.

Almost certainly not.

I can believe it. There are much weirder people out there.

And the bit at the end where someone calls up for a reference and ends up sending a fruit basket has the ring of truth.

Given Initrode reference at the end I'd guess not. It's more of a BOFH vibe I think

DailyWTF convention is to replace actual company names with Innitech and Initrode.

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