Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Over the years, the laws about smoking at the office have drastically changed. When I started my career you could smoke anywhere in the office. Slowly the rules changed so that at first, you could only smoke at your desk if everyone around said it was OK, then it was changed to you could only smoke if you had a private office. This wasn't too bad if your boss was a smoker. Then the rule became that you could only smoke in the special smoking room. Finally, there was no smoking permitted at all. So the smokers would all head outside and stand around the doors to the building. The entries became a wall of smoke and old cigarette butts.

When I started at Symbol, that was basically how things were. But Symbol has a day care center with an outside area so they changed the rule so that you could only smoke outside in the specially built gazebo (picture). This should have been an improvement for the smokers because the gazebo is enclosed so that the smokers don't get rained on. But the smokers were still smoking in other areas. So Symbol put up signs all over the place saying that "Smoking is only permitted in gazebo" but smokers are still smoking in other areas. I am willing to bet that it won't be too long before Symbol does what Computer Associates did and forbid all smoking on Symbol property.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Strangely, it's very different in Russia. Smoking is becoming more and more fashionable, and non-smokers even envy their smoker co-workers (I know I did!)

Jeffrey Goble said...

It's much the same where I work; the "gazebo" is actually a bus stop shelter, for patients and staff (hospital). Most of the patients ignore the directions, so it's common to see them in their hospital gowns,IV poles at their side, standing at the main entrance puffing away. It's a great picture (but I don't have a camera phone yet, lol).