Hey, smokers
I still love you.
I work in a hotel and one of my many peeves is when guests act like it’s absolutely unacceptable to stay in a smoking room when their preference is non-smoking. We absolutely do everything we can to accommodate every single guest but, ultimately, the preference ISN’T a guarantee and, if we’re booked so heavily that there’s only smoking rooms left, you might just have to bite the bullet and deal with it. Of course, none of the rooms go more than a couple years without being renovated and the smell of cigarettes is never really terrible… using air freshener and opening the window for a minute would solve any problem… but these guests act like we’re pumping anthrax into their room through the ventilation system.
Even if you don’t smoke, and I certainly don’t, how is this smell THAT bad? Surely you have friends who smoke or you go to bars where people smoke or you’ve crashed on somebody’s couch and they smoke and it’s fine and nothing’s wrong and you’re a puss if you make a giant fuss over it. Really, there’s nothing wrong with smoking. Nothing at all. It’s not like it’s the smell of garbage or human decomposition or something… it’s just a cigarette. The funny thing about these hotel guests is that some of them are beside themselves to the point of being absolutely hilarious. They are prone to flights of hyperbole that makes me want to suggest a new career writing comedy. One guest told me that he wanted a room that smelled “more like a hotel room and less like a Cuban prison.” My first instinct, which was to ball up his tie and cram it down his throat, aside, I calmly informed him that I find it hard to imagine that it’s that bad. His response was simply that since I had never been to a Cuban prison, it WOULD be hard for me to imagine. His name was thusly added to my “People I’m Going To Shove Down A Flight of Stairs” List.
Another guest told me that he MUST be moved to a new room and that his smoking room smelled like “hell on earth.” Really? Hell on earth? We’re two very short generations away from Auschwitz and THAT’S your vision of hell on earth? Your grandparents might have been marched like cattle into human ovens and a mild vague smell in your delicate nostrils is hell on earth? Are you sure about that?
Anyway, the point is that I want to express solidarity with everyone who smokes. It wasn’t until I worked at this job that I learned what giant, hateful, ignorant and downright wussy douche-nozzles non-smokers are. Really, I don’t know how you put up with us. Non-smokers are, at best, whiny bitches and, at worst, social Nazis who think a bar is far too lovely a place to sully with Poison A when Poison B is a much better way to die early. Bill Hicks really WAS right about everything.
I once brought a girl home to my apartment and she wanted to know if it’s OK to smoke. I told that yes, of course it is, and she still felt awkward and reluctant. I asked her what the problem was and she said that she didn’t want to, knowing that I don’t smoke. I couldn’t believe that… even after I told her to go ahead, society had conditioned her to be ashamed of something that she should have been perfectly alright doing. I utterly demanded that she smoke and I went ahead and smoked a few cigs with her just for solidarity. I felt really bad. Why should she or anyone else feel like a leper pariah because a few uptight douchebags feel the need to inflict their own tastes on everyone else?
We all belong to the same universe, smoker and non-smoker alike. After seeing what smokers go through, I almost want to join in some sort of social crusade. I once had a conversation with a guest who said that it was GREAT that some states banned smoking indoors altogether. “Unless you smoke…” was my reply, social libertarian that I am.
Am I so crazy? Just a couple decades ago, EVERYONE smoked. EVERYONE. The entire world must have smelled like cigarette smoke and that’s hardly a horrible thing. Who cares, really?
Sorry for rambling. The point is this: I love you, smokers. Because you’re doing what you like and unlike the non-smokers of the world, you’re not attempting to force your personal life choice down everyone else’s throats at gunpoint.
Solidarity.
