Friday, July 30, 2004

Smoking ban may expand at hospital

Call me a nicotine nazi, but I think that this proposal is a good one.

This is a very divisive issue. Smokers claim that they get treated like second-class citizens, forced further and further into physical and psychological isolation by "nannies" like me. I would argue that in the workplace, it is the non-smokers who become the unter-menschen.

I hated working with smokers. Because of their slavish addiction choice of habit, they were able to leave the floor to have a cigarette break several times a day. They chalked their need up to "the stress of working in this place." What they failed to care about realize was that the minute that they stepped off the floor, all hell would break loose with their patients as well as mine. The non-smokers couldn't even get a bathroom break, let alone leave the floor for 20-30 minutes.

The most ironic and baffling aspect of working in hospitals, especially on the Respirology floor, was the source of this "stress". My fellow nurses would watch a smoker turn gray and die, then go and have a cigarette break.

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