All I know is we didn’t have COVID-19 back when we could smoke at our desks.
— Just Bill (@WilliamAder) March 9, 2020
I chuckled mightily, because I remember smoking at my desk. When I worked at Madison Books and Computers—that would have been from late 1988 to mid-1993—most of that time, I could smoke in the book room.
Now never mind that the “book room” wasn’t a separate room of any sort. It was a room created by bookshelves and pegboard. The “walls” were maybe seven feet high, with another two to three feet to the ceiling above there.
So, we’re talking a common area. If I smoked in the book room, I smoked in the bookstore. People who weren’t alive then (or who just don’t remember) can’t believe it was that way, but it was. You could smoke in the grocery store. You could smoke in the mall. You could smoke in stores in the mall. I vividly remember smoking while perusing cassettes in Camelot Music and trying to be cool when Karen from Human Phys. showed up and said hi.
I could smoke inside Morton Hall at UAH. There was an area that sat eight people or so, right in the middle of the second floor. I probably smoked four or five cartons sitting there over the course of my college career.
I could smoke pretty much anywhere outside (not only 50 feet from the door, and there wasn’t any such thing as a “smoke free campus”). If you were outside, you were good.
Of course, we’re a very different country today—one of the most restrictive in the world, in fact. It’s easier to smoke just about anywhere else. Though I have no interest in smoking again, I think it’s too much, frankly. I think smoke-free businesses like bars and restaurants ought to be determined by the market, not by laws, for example. Probably things would look about like they do anyway.
But it’ll probably take the collapse of Western civilization for smoking to look anything like it did in my adolescence.
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