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I have never taken even one puff of a cigarette, which is how I've always known that smoking is cool. However, my faith in that assumption is weakened every time I walk by an office building. All those people shivering outside in their little smoking leper colony replaces the James Dean-era image of motorcycle freedom with one of Henry Ford-era dirty workers taking their elevenses with bourbon from the factory store.
Not so long ago a cigarette was a way of showing how dedicated you were to your job, like eating lunch at your desk or chugging a Red Bull during an all-nighter. During World War I, cigarettes came with a soldier's field rations. FDR dangled one while war planning with Churchill and Stalin. Picasso took drags while painting. Keith Hernandez lit up right in the dugout while waiting for his at-bat. (That's right: People smoked at work even if their job was exercising.) Now that only an estimated 20.6 percent of Americans smoke—a 3.5 percent decline over the previous decade—the nonsmoking majority has kicked them out of not only hotels and restaurants but even the one place they have to be. And while white-collar workers smoke much less than everyone else—only 14.6 percent in 2007, compared with 28 percent of blue-collar workers—their offices are much more likely to ban smoking (81.9 percent in 2007) than blue-collar workplaces (62.1 percent that same year).
Smoking has been banished and ostracized from nearly every workplace in America, with laws in many cities forcing smokers to stand 20 feet from any building entrance. In some giant companies, they're kicked off the entire campus, which means a sad, slow walk down to the highway. Last year at the Manhattan office of Hudson Yards, a digital imaging and photo retouching company, President Diane Romano started forcing smokers to punch out during their breaks. The policy change, along with a hypnotist she hired, have reduced her smoking employees from 11 to 3. "I'm not paying you to smoke. I'm paying you to work," says Romano, who figured each break took about 15 minutes, including the time to get down to the sidewalk from the company's 11th-floor office in the elevator. "If it's one or two cigarettes a day, O.K., but when people are going out five times a day, they're losing at least an hour. That's three full workdays every month. It's not fair for those who don't smoke."
All the evidence led me to the conclusion that the coolness of smoking during work was over. I was way wrong. What I hadn't understood was that smokers are precisely the type of people who thrive on being ostracized and banished. These aren't the ex-football players and class presidents who fought for your approval. These are the brooding loners, the ones who—according to the teen smoking analysis found in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point—start smoking not because they want to look cool but because it goes along with all their other self-destructive, class-cutting, early-sex, authority-flouting coolness. These are people who willingly put fire in their mouths. So that little area in front of the building that looks so lame from afar is actually the high school bathroom of the Information Age. Around the country all the cool engineers, accountants, and salespeople skip out of work, duck their boss, gather outside the building, gossip, and—though I could not confirm this—make fun of me.
I also discovered smoking was still cool because none of the people whom I talked to were willing to give me both their name and the company they work for on the record. That only happens when you write about the CIA, extramarital affairs, or AIG. In their anonymity, numerous smokers told me that, while the nonsmokers look down on them as slackers, their habits have actually helped advance their careers. A salesman for online ads says he has a special bond with clients who smoke, and Jennifer, who worked at an accounting consulting firm in Orange County, Calif., claims that—just like in episodes of Friends and How I Met Your Mother—she never did better at work than when she had a boss who smoked.
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