I have my own gripe with smoking co-workers. I spent an unpleasant year at a company where the man using the desk next to mine was a smoker. He would turn up at nine o'clock, switch on his computer, and promptly go for a coffee and a smoke. At nine-thirty he would reappear, answer a couple of e-mails, open and discard his junk mail, and go for a smoke. At ten o'clock he would reappear, look at his list of tasks for the day, and go for a smoke. At ten-thirty he would reappear, send an e-mail to management suggesting his first task be reassigned to me or someone else, and go for a smoke. And so on.

I became very tired of having to open the emergency door, setting off all sorts of burglar alarms and annoying security, to tell him he was wanted urgently on the phone. I calculated that over the course of a working day of seven hours, he would smoke twenty cigarettes and do perhaps thirty-five or forty minutes of actual work. Meanwhile, I would do seven hours work, and find myself upbraided if I left my desk for the most urgent of personal reasons.

I am currently working odd shifts behind a bar, while unemployed, and have equal objections to other bar staff who assume that once they have lit a cigarette, they can ignore customers and all other duties until they regretfully grind out the stub in an ashtray. Non-smokers (such as myself) seem to be treated as an inferior class to the smokers, who appear to be entitled to time off to indulge their habit.