I'm not even going to tear into your ignorant rant but rather I'm going to give you the situation of where I work.
I report for work at 7:30 a.m. and take a 4 1/2 minute smoke break at approximately 9:30 a.m. and another at 11:05 a.m.. As for the afternoon, I take another 4 1/2 minute break at 2:30 p.m.
A gal I work next to reports for work the same time as I, 7:30 a.m., chats with Kristen for approximately 20 minutes, calls her husband and chats for another 15 or so minutes, goes over to another girl's cube and chats for a number of minutes, goes back to her cube and calls up her daycare sitter and checks up on her new baby, then calls her mom and chats for uncounted minutes.
Once our call center phone lines go live at 9:00 a.m., she may or may not be available!
This crap goes on every single darn day with her and several other people I work with.
And so I am the pariah here simply because I spend 10 minutes outside of my cubicle every morning and another 5 or so minutes in the afternoon enjoying my smokes!
Don't hand me your crap that smokers are non-productive because of all the smokers I have ever had the enjoyment of working with they have been more productive than any nico-nazi I have ever come in contact with!!!
Without exception, that's been my experience too.
There's this false scenario being set up by the Nico-Nazis that smokers are skulking around all day, desperately searching out a dark corner to sneak a smoke, while the non-smokers valiantly hold up not only their end, but are burdened by taking on the neglected work of smokers, too.
In the real world, smokers have a smoke on their morning and afternoon breaks and during lunch and are generally (as a proportion of the population) less whiny about everything in general.
I love your rant. 99 out of 100 times you will find that a smoker who can smoke at his/her desk is going to be more functional and more focused on the task at hand then the non-smoker who needs to go to the coffee machine or the soda machine or vending machine every 15 or 20 minutes.
Some years ago I worked in a small law firm. 2 of the 3 of us were smokers. One day the lawyer we worked for decided to can smoking in the office and required the 2 of us who smoked to go out back to have a cigarette. That policy lasted only 1 week.
He didn't 86 the no-smoking policy because we were taking too mush time on smoke breaks, he canned it because he relaized that we, the smokers, were away from our desks far less then the one non-smoker in the office. After the non-smoking experiment, the non-smoker in the office was put on notice to curb her personal phone calls and find more reliable afterschool child care or find a new job.