I do not smoke, but I think smokers are absolutely brilliant. It’s the greatest excuse possible to excuse yourself from working, and it’s absoutely, 100% legit.
If you’re not a smoker and you get up to go stretch your legs and take a break, chances are your micromanaging boss will see you and will cite “slacking off” as a reason you’re not getting a raise at your next performance review.
However, if you are a smoker, you are free to excuse yourself whenever you want to go have a smoke. The entire corporate infrastructure is based around understanding nicotine cravings. Not only will you get out of working for a while, but you will get empathy from your coworkers and boss (who probably also smokes). In fact, chances are at least 3 other people will come out with you to join you for a smoke. So not only are you getting out of work, but you’re also building your relationship with your coworkers (“putting in face time”). And if your boss joins you for that smoke break, you can bet on getting a fantastic raise after the next review cycle.
To make things even better, if you’re a hardcore smoker who needs their fix every hour or so, you can effectively reduce your workweek by a few hours on a regular basis:
Say you work an 8 hour day (yeah right), and say every 2 hours you need a cigarette. Suppose that you can get outside, smoke, and get back to your desk in 10 minutes. So in your 8 hour day you will take 4 smoke breaks, each of which lasts 10 minutes, or 40 minutes total. If you do that every day, that’s 200 minutes per week, which is 3 hours and 20 minutes total. In other words, every week you get over 3 hours of break time without penalty.
Brilliant.
It seems that smokers can take as many breaks as they want, especially when it comes from the top.
And what’s a smoke without a coffee… It makes for a great session of doing jack shit!
Four cigarettes in an 8-hour day would be a fairly light smoker. Assuming that a person sleeps for eight hours a day, that leaves 16 waking hours to smoke. A pack-a-day smoker (which is close to the average consumption) would smoke 1.25 cigarettes per hour on average. Pack-a-day smokers would be smoking 16 cigarettes in the remaining eight hours if they’re only smoking four cigarettes during their eight-hour workday. Possible, but I think most smokers smoke more than four in a workday, meaning that they’re getting even more free breaks.
Of course, we’re all free to take up smoking if we really want to, so I can’t begrudge them the time too much.