[geeks] This bogles my mind

[Gregory Leblanc]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Cantrell [mailto:david at cantrell.org.uk]
> 
[snip]
> I find it quite absurd that a company can get away with requiring that
> employees are not smokers.  Sure, forbid smoking on company 
> premises, make
> sure they make up the time they take for their ciggie breaks, 
> but to deny
> someone employment solely because they smoke outside of 
> working hours is
> just as absurd as denying someone employment just because 
> they have a drink
> with their evening meal.

I find these two -completely- different issues.  Nicotine is incredibly
strongly addictive, and most smokers can't go 8, nor even 4, hours without a
smoke.  So, how often does a smoker need to go suck a butt?  Every other
hour?  Where I'm at, it's probably a 5 minute walk to get to the outside,
including the elevator ride.  So, that's 5 minutes to get from the cube to
the outside world, and 5 minutes to get back, plus however long that smoke
takes.  Let's call it a 15 minute interruption, and you've got at least two
of those a day (assuming they can get a smoke before they start the day, at
lunch, and immediately after they leave.  Now they can certainly make up
that half hour of work by stretching out the day a bit, but that's not the
limit of the costs.  For starters, there's also an interruption of work.  If
I'm in the middle of some process that's taking me a while, and I start to
get jittery because withdrawal is kicking in, I'm going to work slower until
I get the drugs back into my system.  Most people I've met don't notice this
immediately, so they're going to be jittering for at least 15 minutes or so,
before they figure it out, and do something about it.  If I take a 15 minute
break from something I'm in the middle of, when I get back, I'm going to
have to figure out where I was at in order to pick things back up.
That's just the immediate costs in productivity, it doesn't count other
costs, like higher health insurance rates and costs for smokers.  Nor does
it count the costs for having ashtrays and such outside of the building for
people to deposit their butts in.  If employees are outside smoking and
clouding up the air at the front entrance, and I'm going into that business
as a customer, I'm not going to be terribly happy, and I'm prone to be a lot
more aggressive in any negotiations than I'm involved in.  There are a LOT
of costs associated with employing smokers, and I've only touched on a few.
Drinking, as long as it's not alcoholism, isn't such a problem, because
people can control it a lot better.
	Greg

P.S.  If you haven't noticed, I'm a militant anti-smoker.  Comes from having
watched my best friend's dad die of lung cancer, I think.