If you like the outdoor life, then smoking is for you. Smokers in this country now live in a parallel universe where they seek out ‘fresh air’ outside at regular intervals. Have a meal with a smoker and much of the time you’ll be sitting by yourself. Work with a smoker and they’ll spend more time outside reception than a security guard. It’s fast becoming one of the strangest aspects of working life. Freemasonry is frowned up in business simply because it is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as giving unfair advantage to its members who go out of their way to help each other out. Smoking should be banned on the same principle because it acts as an informal and rather smoky freemasonry in any organisation. By default smokers meet on a regular basis in virtually every organisation. Well, they actually meet just outside the door of every organisation. In these meetings some of the most effective internal communication gets done, because these gatherings are entirely democratic and cross functional. IT Directors meet with shop floor assistants and tax lawyers on an equal basis and virtually anything can and does get discussed. These meeting are incredibly powerful for other reasons. In some really hard-headed thrusting organisations, the top management insist that all meetings should be done standing up so they don’t run on too long. Smokers meetings are always done standing up and generally in bad weather conditions so that things are discussed very quickly and effectively. Plus it takes on average four minutes to smoke one cigarette which also encourages brevity. The other beautiful thing about smoking meetings is that even senior management have to inhale sometimes and this is where you can say your piece. If you smoke six cigarettes a day and each one takes ten minutes for you to get out of the building, light up and get back to your desk, then you are spending roughly an hour a day on your habit. If you were spending the same amount of time on Facebook or just standing outside the building watching the traffic, management would be right to take a very dim view of it. Smokers often justify their absence from the workplace by claiming that smoking clears the mind and allows you to concentrate. Putting aside the effect of nicotine which presumably has the same effect as a breath of fresh air without being fresh or air, one of the most effective things about smoking is that it provides a ten minute safety margin before doing anything incredibly foolish (apart from smoking itself that is). All those smokers standing outside may look as though they’re being bone idle but what they’re actually doing is pondering big decisions before rushing in and making them. Really big decisions may require ten to twenty cigarettes a day. Many smokers work in Health and Safety. On the surface there would seem to be a bit of tension between personal addiction and professional responsibilities. However, knowing that you’re proactively shortening your own life actually gives a very keen insight into the value of life generally in an organisation. If you’ve managed not to kill yourself in an industrial accident it kind of makes you feel better about smoking: you’ve given yourself an extra forty years so knocking one or two off by smoking doesn’t seem so bad. Fire Drills are also a lot more interesting for smokers. In the event of a fire, one should always find the nearest smoker and stay close to them on the principle that they will always know the quickest way out of any building. The only trouble with this is that, at the first sound of a bell, smokers will be incredibly quick off the mark because they know they’re getting a free smoking break outside. Of course the alternative suggestion is that smokers are very keen to see that Fire Drills are effective because they’re the ones most likely to have started the fire in the first place. Smokers will tell you between coughs that another great benefit of smoking is that it gives you something to do with your hands. This makes it sounds like smokers have previously been suffering from some kind of Bored Hand Syndrome. There is actually a lot you can do with a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, even more will a roll up. Watching some people rolling a cigarette makes you think that the half an hour of intense picking, packing, stuffing, rolling, licking and tapping is hardly worth the couple of drags they get at the end. The truth is that the ritual of smoking is part of the attraction and one of the difficulties of using patches to give up is that you can’t play with a patch in your hands, share it round the group and generally caress it lovingly for ten minutes before you slap it on. Tobacco companies come in for some fierce criticism which is probably justified given that, whichever way you look at it, they are purveyors of death. In fact they’re probably slightly lower on the ethical food chain than arms dealers because with weapons you can at least make the case for heavily armed deterrence leading to peace, whereas heavy smoking is never going to lead to better health. Putting the death thing to one side for a moment, it’s slightly ironic that tobacco companies are amongst the most effective marketing organisations. This is because they have to fight nail and coffin to keep their brands in the public eye when government is trying very hard to keep the public’s eye firmly shut or at least gaping in horror. All the vices of sex and drugs and drink and fags are the most innovative in sales and marketing. There’s a lesson there somewhere. If we were to criminalise tomato ketchup or make it a class A drug or a serious fetish then its sales and marketing would change out of all recognition too. It’s almost worth trying to see what would happen.
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