Zero Tolerance gone mad again! - or - I'm in trouble

The BBQ Pit
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In my younger years I haved worked in the same type of situation but it was not smokers. It was the drama queen that needed to fix her makeup every half hour or the jock that needed to talk to his friends outside or the kid who needed to call momma every hour. That sort of unfairness happens everywhere and on every job. Life is not fair.

I also do not want this to turn into a “us against them” thread . A new thread might need started for which I do not have the zeal to do.

I agree with you that a smoker or a non-smoker should not get any extra privaleges. If they can skip out for five then you should be able too.

I do not feel in any way that I should be allowed extra time because I am a smoker. As an addiction, a casual indulgance or a rare occurance should not matter.

I do have the right to use my breaks as I feel free to do so as others that are non-smokers use their breaks and are free to use them. If I get coffee then I do that, if I have a smoke then I do that.

I do not in any way feel that smokers should get extra time or a privalage to smoke at the job. If my employer should create a policy that says “X” amount a time for smokes then I would follow it or no times is allowed for smoke breaks then I would follow it. As I stated before, I follow rules. We have had a non-smoking building since I started there is 1992. I am not pissed off that I have to stand outside.

I just want my break(s) to do what I want to do. If I get coffee, take a hearty piss, talk about my kids, gab about my cats or grab a fucking cigarette, I should have that right to burn up that time as I choose.

If I take no breaks does that make me the model employee/person?

9 to 5.

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Here’s how I look at it:

Federal labor law mandates that I get a 30-minute unpaid “lunch break” if my shift is 5 hours or longer. It also dictates that I receive a 10-minute paid “coffee break” for every 4 hours I work. So for an 8-hour shift, I’m entitled to one 30-minute break and two 10-minute breaks. In some jobs/states an employee may be entitled to more/longer breaks, but these are the minimum required breaks. The words “coffee break” in the law constitute a generic term that basically means “rest period” (in fact, now that I think about it, I think the wording has been changed to “rest period”). I don’t have to drink coffee during this time. I’m entitled to step outside and have a cigarette instead.

It doesn’t take me 10 minutes to smoke a cigarette - I can suck one down in less than 5 minutes. I’ve never had an employer (outside of fast food jobs as a teenager) who objected to my taking four 5-minute breaks instead of two 10-minute breaks.

I rather fortunate in my current job, in that I can take a break pretty much any time I please. The nature of the work (I describe it as “event-based” as opposed to “transaction-based”) is such that there are periods of intensive activity (during which I suck it up and devote myself to getting my work done, with no breaks - I once worked a 9-hour stretch without a break, because that’s what the situation called for) interspersed with periods of nothing to do at all. Fortunately, my boss isn’t into “busy work” any more than I am, so if there’s nothing to do then there’s nothing to do and I’m free to sit on my ass in my car smoking cigarettes and reading a book for as long as I want, if that’s what I want to do.

The only boss I’ve ever had who complained about the number of smoke breaks I took was a smoker herself. Except that she took up smoking at the age of 26 specifically for the purpose of being allowed to take smoke breaks. In other words, while I took breaks to smoke, she smoked to take breaks. So she looked at smoking as being little more than an excuse to take a break. She finally shut up when I pointed out that, though my smoke breaks were more frequent than her own, mine lasted approximately three minutes (no longer than it took me to smoke a cigarette) while hers stretched on for 15 minutes (how do you keep a single cigarette going that long, anyway?) So I might smoke twice as many cigarettes as her during a shift, but still spend considerably less total time “on break”.

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Look, that’s all well and good that you were keeping track of your time and making your ciggy breaks equal what’s fair to everyone else (SomeUserNameandPhase42). Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough in my rant, because I have no problem with that. Like I said, if you want to smoke, crap, eat, wank, call your SO for a nooner, sleep, or smoke while doing all of those simultaneously (especially the smoking one :))I have no problem with that. My gripe was with the people I worked with who had twice as long of a break time as I did, because they were smokers and took smoke breaks, and then took the same length of time on their regular breaks.

And, just to further clarify, if you have a job that just encompasses a body of work that needs doing, I don’t care what the christ you do with your time. If you’re some kind of super-genius who can produce 30,000 lines of code the day before a product is due having spent the entire allotted 3-week period* before that doing any of the aforementioned wanking or smoking or smoking and wanking, or possibly smoking and smoking, I also don’t care. The boss might wonder why he’s paying you for 3 weeks of work that you can do in 8 hours, but that’s not my concern, nor do I want it to be my concern.

I was fortunate in my last job as well that essentially my duties were to clear out an email box full of customer requests within a 2-day window. As long as I was able to do that, no one said a damn thing. Well, people did, but they loved starting drama and they missed my services when I ditched them to do something that didn’t make me feel like my brain was melting out of my eyeballs every day.

So to sum up, I have a problem with people who have longer break time than the break time I get if it’s the kind of job where you punch a clock (essentially), whether they are smoking or believe that they must run outside every hour to pray to the god of lettuce.

*If it wasn’t apparent from my sentence, I don’t know crap about programming (well, ok, I had a javascript class in HS, possibly raising my lack of knowledge about programming above the “crap” layer and into the “dick” layer) and timeframes of such. It was just the first thing that came to mind when I thought about “body of work that needs doing.”

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You want a zero tolerance nightmare? Just go to Dubai:

:eek:

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[hijack]It makes sense. It’s just redundant. “Verbal” means “using language,” which encompasses both written and oral communications.
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