delicious rantalicious

Actually, I'm in a lovely mood today so there's no real spleen (haha) in this rant, but I've been becoming progressively more annoyed by this since its beginning, and the time has arrived to write about it.

Let me preface this by saying I am by no means one of those rabid anti-smoking people. At all. I've never smoked--my mom having been a smoker, I always thought it was kind of a gross, smelly habit--and I haven't dated someone who smoked since my sophomore year in high school, so I suppose it's kind of a dealbreaker in the romance department, and I was pissed when my son briefly took it up, but by and large, I figure other people's smoking is their business, not mine. We clear on that? Okay.

As of November something, the hospital I work at has gone completely nonsmoking. As in, you cannot smoke on the grounds anywhere, even in the parking lots, and employees are prohibited from smoking in their own cars. Which, you know how I feel about Big Brother telling people what they can do in their own vehicles, even if you're parked on their property, but whatever. This isn't, lemme say upfront, due to any concern about anyone's health, so matter how they try to spin it. It they were so concerned about their patients' and employees' health, they stop serving shit in the cafeteria that's 50% saturated fat and 50% sugar, okay? Rumor has it the JCAH is very soon going to stop accrediting hospitals that allow smoking anywhere on their grounds, and that's triggered this new rule.

So, let's pull a completely made up statistic out of my ass, as I so often do. Let's estimate that 20% of the employees of this hospital are smokers. During their lunch (half)hours, they can leave the grounds and go smoke, right? But I daresay, most of them can't go through a whole work day smoking just the once. They are physically addicted, y'know? So what are they going to do on their breaks, when time is short and they really want a cigarette? They're in a tough spot. Well, the ones who are mannerly will leave the grounds and go for a walk around the block or something. I can't say I'd be exactly pleased if I was one of the near-neighbors with hoards of hospital smokers now traipsing past my front lawn everyday, but still, it's a fairly polite solution.

The ones who are rude and inconsiderate? They'll go smoke in the bus shelter immediately in front of the hospital which is ostensibly for little old ladies and people with babies in their strollers to use to wait for the goddamned bus. I wait for my bus across the street and I see them coming down the hill in little clumps, in their scrubs and their ID badges. And because the shelter isn't hospital property--I suppose it's MBTA property--security says nothing. In the three weeks or so since the new policy, there have accumulated approximately 4000 cigarette butts in and around that bus shelter. Which no one cleans because it's not hospital property, it's MBTA property and they're not even aware it exists. It's disgusting. And it's this kind of behavior that makes people into anti-smoking zealots.

xoxo