Ah, an ex-smoker, the most insufferable type of anti-smoker.
Look, I can fully appreciate that you don't like the smell of cigarette smoke. Heck I'm a smoker (and sometimes non-smoker), and I don't like the smell of it either. I also don't care for the smell of B.O., coffee, and many perfumes and colognes. In fact, an too much of the latter, like in the perfume area of a department store, sets of my asthma (but cigarette smoke doesn't, strangely enough). But I wouldn't dream of making as ignorant of a comment in an elevator as the one in the story above, regardless of how much some smell bothered me.
Keep trying, someday you will win. Then you'll eventually get your true sense of smell and taste back as well as fell better everyday. I still shudder to think of how my days used to start, having to clear out the previous days intake, then starting it all over again. Good luck and health to you!
If you are a smoker - you can't smell it.
I smoked 2 packs of Kools a day for 20 years - I quit on the day of my massive heart attack (most people do not know that for every one smoker who dies of lung cancer or emphysema - 19 die from tobacco related heart attacks). It took me two years to be able to smell that smell that nonsmokers always talked about.
It doesn't smell like stale smoke - it smells like a broken sewer pipe. It is very nasty.
That smell can linger for years. Last spring I pulled a jacket out of the back of my closet. (I have not smoked for 9 years.) On my way to work I kept smelling smoke, I finally realized it was coming from the jacket. After eight years, it still reeked!
How can you hate the smell of coffee?? The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup, you know.