Maybe it’s just that it’s been a long time since I was an hourly employee, but in my mind “break” = “my time”. Also, in my mind, “my car” = “my property” in which I will damned well smoke if I like, provided that I do it with the windows closed and utilize my ashtray, thus not infringing on *their * property. I’m just glad I don’t work for such insufferable nazis.
It wasn’t my intention to call you an asshole, I apologize if you took it that way. I still think that doing a dance of joy over the persecution of one’s coworkers is assholish behavior, but for what it’s worth, I also think that smoking right outside the doorway is assholish behavior.
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?
I am so glad I quit smoking. I work 10 hr days. I get two paid 15min breaks and a 30 min unpaid lunch. Back when I smoked, I would smoke two on the way to work - impressive considering it’s only a 5-8 min drive. If it was nice out and I wanted to drive my motorcycle to work, I’d have to get up a bit earlier so I could smoke before I left for work and than have another once I got there.
I start work at 6:30. By 7:30 or 8:00 I’d start jonesing for a smoke. Sometimes I’d sneak out, but usually I’d just suffer through it. At 9:30 I’d get my official break and I’d go outside and smoke a cigarette - I’d smoke two if I hadn’t already snuck out.
By 10:30 or 11:00 I’d start jonesing again and depending on who was around or if I thought I could get away with it, I might sneak out again. 12:30 was lunch. I’d only get 1/2hr so I’d scarf my food down in 15mins, so I’d have the next 15mins to go outside and smoke two more cigs.
I could usually make it the next two hours til my next break before smoking two more. Then I’d have about another two hours before I left for the day.
I really sucked spending half of my work day feeling like I needed a smoke.
It’s been nine months since I smoked and things are so much easier.
FWIW, I don’t feel cheated out of breaks because the smokers are going out for breaks. There’s nothing stopping me from going outside for fresh air on my breaks.
Essentially where I work, you either get your work done, or you don’t.
No one monitors how much you smoke, how much you bullshit in someone else’s office, how much time
you’re in the bathroom, how much time you’re on the 'net, if you come in late, or leave early.
To try to “make things fair” requires an amount of supervision that is bad for everyone, IMO.
And, I’m not a smoker. And, yes, our smokers leave for 10 minutes at a time several times per day.
I just went and got coffee. Before I went I type the “date” command on my system and did it again when I came back:
> date
Tue Jul 1 09:44:31 MDT 2008
> date
Tue Jul 1 09:45:55 MDT 2008
In 1 minute and 24 seconds, I went to the coffee pot, filled my cup, started a new pot (since taking the last cup is my particular superpower), added two packets of it’s-probably-going-to-cause-cancer sweetener and a dollop of artificial, hydrocarbon-based creamer substance and walked back to my desk.
A smoker would maybe have reached the front door in that time.
Not a good comparison.
On the other hand I waste more time on this board:
A further opinion, if I can post-post to my own posting, is that, as a non-smoker, it’s not really my business if my coworker is taking an unscheduled smoke break.
My employer pays me for 8 hours of work per day, I’m supposed to give him 8 hours. If he’s paying Mr. Smokestoomuch for 7 hours effort, that’s really a problem for my employer, not me.
The obvious exception is that if that coworker is sticking me with more work while he’s outside taking another 15 minute break. If there’s 16 man-hours worth of work, my obligation should end at 8 hours.
I have friends, a married couple, that have a real problem with their smoking. Its bad enough that they don’t go to movies anymore, neither can go the 2 hours from the movie’s start to its end without smoking. I find that pitiable.
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.
Sigmagirl, The fear of needing a smoke is way worse than the actual need. That’s why Chimera’s coworker would ask to go for a smoke before there was a chance that he’d be stuck by himself without being able to have one.
You don’t think about the need for a smoke while you sleep, so you don’t need one. For me, a smoke just before going to bed and immediately upon waking up helped too.
I often went to work (night job) without eating and didn’t eat until I got home after a 10-hour shift. Of course, I also subsisted completely on M&Ms and toast (no, not together). I’ve no idea why I’m still alive.
Small business owner chiming in. I have very few office policies, and it works for me. If an employee takes a break to mainline heroin, and it doesn’t affect their work , then I’m cool with it. If an employee does not do their job they are warned, then fired. I know it isn’t standard operating procedure, but my employees and I are cool with it.
First of all, I did not start this thread as a “i don’t smoke so nobody else can” bash. I don’t care what other people do on their own time. I just didn’t think its right that smokers get to do less work per day than non smokers.
Yesterday I brought this issue up with my manager, and he told me I could take short ‘fresh air’ breaks as needed. However, I was in an office a couple years ago where I was told I could only leave for my lunch break and to smoke.
This is what bothered me the most about my smoking co-workers. I’d be working on a project, and have to put it away for “just a quick smoke”, which was more often twenty minutes. If the smoker needed three smoke breaks, then that was an hour that I had to cover her job. Usually I couldn’t do both jobs at once, and then I would get into trouble because SHE needed her smoke breaks and I couldn’t complete my own tasks. Plus, I wouldn’t be able to take breaks of my own, because I was behind on my work.
Some smokers are quite considerate, and do not abuse their co-workers. Others are complete jerks.
It needs to be mentioned that this whole thing is the fault of the non-smokers anyways. When I first entered the workforce, it was perfectly acceptable to light up at your desk and continue working. Then, for better or worse, society decided that this was a bad thing and that smokers needed to go outside if they wanted to smoke.
I am okay with everything up to this point.
Now, the smokers go outside so as not to pollute the clean indoor air (which is still not clean enough as some of you need “fresh air breaks”) , and the same people who made them go outside to smoke are now bitching that they are taking time to go outside and smoke.
Just be honest and admit that you hate smoking and smokers and be done with it.
I do not do “less work per day” than my non-smoking co-workers, and I find it an unsafe assumption that your smoking co-workers do “less work per day” than you do. Apparently they’re not doing their work on *your * preferred schedule, but since they don’t report to you, that’s not really an issue.
As a smoker, I find that *any * time I’m away from my desk, people assume I’ve gone to have a cigarette. Um… no. I have any number of *work-related * tasks that require me to leave my desk. And if I don’t report to you, I’m not inclined to send you a memo detailing how I spend my day.
The fact is that many of us have no real idea what our coworkers do all day. There’s a good reason for that. It’s none of our freakin’ business. It’s between them and their bosses. Bitch all you like, but accept the fact that mostly what you’re doing is indulging your inner toddler. BUT IT’S NOT FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIR!!!
I work in a call-centre, and we get a 15 minute break every 1.5 hours. Some people smoke in that time (me included) some people walk or read the newspaper or eat, some people play Hakki Sack in the carpark. Whatever turns you on I guess.
Just to point out, there are no special accommodations for smokers.