I'll come at this from another point of view: I'm a smoker. Moderately heavy and unrepentant. And I've been at it long enough to remember when you could smoke in airplanes, in some shops, at some jobs (I've had some where I smoked at my desk, literally). So the last 20 years has been a process of being always pushed into smaller and smaller corners. The funny thing is, I bitch about of course but I don't truly mind for the most part. I understand the health reasons, I understand the unpleasantness of the smell to many people. I would never smoke in a non-smoker's house or car without explicit permission and I have no problem taking it outside.
Truth is, I enjoy those little five=minute breaks from work every two hours or so. I like having an excuse to step outside and look at something besides my desk and talk to the other people doing the same thing (the majority of my department--it's the newspaper biz!)
What I would like, though, in exchange for my disproportionate tax contribution (as Mike pointed out) is to be able to keep at least one kind of space, and geez, you'd think it would be bars! In 20 years as a lounge lizard I've hardly met any bartenders who didn't smoke themselves, and when I go out to Chicago music scene-type things...well, let's just say that's one of the last social enclaves left where smokers are a strong majority. I think I will definitely go out less when the smoking ban goes into effect here, because it simply won't be as much fun. Why pay cover charges and expensive bar prices just to stand outside like I do at work? A band's gonna have to be really, really good to get me to do that--and just to hang out with friends? I guess we'll all be doing a lot more entertaining at home.
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I'll come at this from another point of view: I'm a smoker. Moderately heavy and unrepentant. And I've been at it long enough to remember when you could smoke in airplanes, in some shops, at some jobs (I've had some where I smoked at my desk, literally). So the last 20 years has been a process of being always pushed into smaller and smaller corners. The funny thing is, I bitch about of course but I don't truly mind for the most part. I understand the health reasons, I understand the unpleasantness of the smell to many people. I would never smoke in a non-smoker's house or car without explicit permission and I have no problem taking it outside.
Truth is, I enjoy those little five=minute breaks from work every two hours or so. I like having an excuse to step outside and look at something besides my desk and talk to the other people doing the same thing (the majority of my department--it's the newspaper biz!)
What I would like, though, in exchange for my disproportionate tax contribution (as Mike pointed out) is to be able to keep at least one kind of space, and geez, you'd think it would be bars! In 20 years as a lounge lizard I've hardly met any bartenders who didn't smoke themselves, and when I go out to Chicago music scene-type things...well, let's just say that's one of the last social enclaves left where smokers are a strong majority. I think I will definitely go out less when the smoking ban goes into effect here, because it simply won't be as much fun. Why pay cover charges and expensive bar prices just to stand outside like I do at work? A band's gonna have to be really, really good to get me to do that--and just to hang out with friends? I guess we'll all be doing a lot more entertaining at home.