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glowie
Europeans can thank the "devil" for smoking. Rodrigo de Jerez, was one of the crewmen on Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the New World in 1492.
Jerez is often credited as the first European smoker. After learning to smoke from the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, he brought back tobacco to his hometown in Spain. However, the sight of him inhaling and exhaling clouds of smoke was unfamiliar and frightening to people who had never seen it before.
According to some accounts, when Jerez's wife saw him smoking, she was terrified and believed he was either possessed by the devil or had gained the ability to breathe fire and smoke. She reported him to the local Spanish Inquisition.
The Inquisition, also unfamiliar with tobacco smoking, reportedly imprisoned Jerez for his "sinful and infernal" habits. After seven years, he was released, but the ban on smoking remained in place for a while.
By the time Jerez was released, smoking had become more common in Spain and throughout Europe, and his "demonic" habit was no longer seen as unusual.
This is third-hand info, but apparently the Optus situation was heaps cooked.
Every one of their devices had been deregistered and needed to essentially “register” with their servers, i.e., a tower.
A similar thing happened with Telstra a while ago that impacted only Vic and Tas, but it took them ages because they had to take a bunch of towers offline and slowly bring them on so that all the devices constantly trying to re-register didn’t brute-force them and take things offline again
Multiply that by a few hundred thousand/million devices and that’s what Optus was dealing with... Oof
Not unless you go against mainstream history and believe that trade with the Americas occurred long before the conquistadors made their way there.
Tobacco is indigenous to the Americas.