[QUOTE=jali]
“I don’t smoke so NO ONE should smoke.”
“I don’t drink so NO ONE should drink.”
“I don’t ________ so NO ONE should _______.”
Isn’t that about it, OP? If you were a smoker, perhaps the candy eaters would be the ones being roasted here. ‘Those *candy eaters * leave their desks to buy candy at least twice a day. I don’t eat candy and I deserve the right to leave my desk and walk to the candy machine. It’s not fair! They’re stealing time from the company and I am appalled that management allows this.’
Could the time spent monitoring others be used more productively? It’s difficult to clock other’s breaks when concentrating on one’s own duties. Are you stealing company time?
[/QUOTE]
I can’t speak for the crowd, of course, but in my case, I get irked with the smokers at my office because *their * indulgence directly affects my productivity negatively. It’s a primary rule of my office that The Phones Must Be Covered. All phones, all the time. So if my neighbor buggers off to have a smoke break (which takes a minimum of 15 minutes - and is more likely gonna be 20), I’m stuck minding those phones in addition to my own phones until such time as they return to their desk. Granted, if I leave my desk, my neighbor must return the favor. But, since I do not smoke anymore, I leave my desk much less often.
This is because I have never worked with a smoker who took only smoke breaks (discounting lunch breaks or lack thereof). Every single smoker I have ever worked with took smoke breaks *in addition to * bathroom breaks, running to get a cup of coffee, etc. They never give up the other breaktimes in favor of smoking. Maybe Doper smokers are different - and good for you if that’s the case! But the smokers I worked with generally took the same bathroom and coffe-fetching breaks as everyone else, and then took their smoke breaks also.
This cuts into my own productivity - because I must cover their phones (and answer queries that would otherwise be directed at the absent smoker - because Gd knows anyone who wanders by with a question, if stymied by the absence of the person to whom they’d intended to direct the question will 9 times in 10 just ask the nearest warm body to where they’d expected their question-answerer to be), that’s time I’m not doing my own job. Quite often, I’ll “inherit” a task that rightfully belongs to the absent smoker - not a major project, but just one of the thousand little things that suck up 10 - 30 minutes of time that crop up in any job. In other words, things it’s more trouble that it’s worth (from an efficiency standpoint) to try and hand back off to my absentee coworker - or things that just aren’t conducive to handing off. All those little things cut into the amount of time I have to work on my own major projects. Not to mention just the bare need to Cover The Phones cuts into time I work on my own projects.
Back when I worked with smokers (thankfully, both of my current neighbors are smokefree), I found that I never had time to take a “non-smoking” break because in order to keep up with my own crap and deal with the inherited tasks, my break got sacrificed. It was a rare coworker-smoke-break moment when I spent the entirety of their smoke break working only on my own work. Generally speaking, from a personal-productivity standpoint, I didn’t get any more of my work done during their break than they got done of theirs. Often, I ended up with more work after their break than I had before it. That represents either a net loss for my productivity on my own work or, at best, no gain. In other words, if my coworker is taking two smoke breaks a day and I’m taking two non-smoke breaks a day, I’m effectively taking four breaks a day as far as my actual work is concerned - and that’ll show up on your productivity.
I’ll also point out that since inherited tasks are rarely project-centered tasks (they tend to be administrative minutia of one form or another), the smoke break often results in an increase in overall productivity for my absentee coworker, purely because someone else got stuck with a time-waster task that takes away from work done on actual projects instead of them. And that’s profoundly irritating for the person getting stuck with it in the long run.
Yes, I could have been a hardass about making people wait for the absentee to get back and take their own damn tasks, but that’s not very professional of me - that’s exactly the kind of thing that just screams that whoever does it isn’t a “team player” or whatever the current jargon is. There’s nothing quite like repeating some variation of the phrase “I’m sorry that’s not my job” three or four times a day to people trying to stick you with tasks that rightly belong to an absent coworker to do unfortunate things to your reputation at work. Like it or not, the choice is either take the damn task (and therefore be responsible for it forevermore) or be the one that they remember as refusing the task. It doesn’t matter that you were in a position to refuse the task solely because someone else was taking a smoke break and that the task isn’t part of your job - nobody ever remembers that part. People only remember that you didn’t take the task. Hell, even managers generally only remember that you were the one that didn’t take the task.
And forget about discussing it with your manager if it happens the manager is a smoker, too.
I’m not saying smokers are bad people - or lazy or unproductive or doing the “let’s burn all the smokers at the stake and dance in the ashes” thing that crops up around these parts sometimes. I am saying, however, that not all non-smokers who complain about the breaks are just being whiny time-Nazis. Some of us, at least, have a legitimate beef with it.