A Parable About Prohibition
Jason Kuznicki on Jul 29th 2004
At the Johns Hopkins University Krieger Computing Lab, a longtime policy had it that food and drinks were not allowed in the lab itself. A convention developed whereby the students left these messy items on the counter near the entrance to the lab.
In the old days, whenever you visited the lab you would always be greeted by a row of water bottles and lunch bags, all of them stashed neatly away from the fragile computers. This was a reasonable development, but one which has sadly been curtailed of late. At the entrance to the lab, a new sign now informs us that food and drink are forbidden “ON THE COUNTER or IN THE LAB.”
So now we’ve all stopped drinking water. But strangely, there seem to be a lot more backpacks being brought in the computer lab, all of them zipped firmly shut against the administrators’ prying eyes…
Filed in The Basement