I grew up in a house with smokers, picked it up as a teenager and smoked a pack a day for 20 years after that. Now I can smell someone lighting up 2 blocks away.
It’s kind of crazy. As time passed without smoking, I noticed many things smelled differently to me. For example, I was repulsed by the smell of cheddar cheese the first time I smelled it after quitting. I can’t put it into words properly but it smelled so different from what I was expecting that the thought of taking a bite made my stomach turn.
This was my experience too. Now I can’t stand the smell of cigarrettes at all.
I wish I couldn’t stand the smell. It’s been a few years now but I still get regular cravings.
That’s interesting! My uninformed guess: since smoke is such a powerful smell, smoking constantly probably suppresses one‘s ability to smell other things - so after 20 years you’re probably accustomed to things smelling less strong and more smokey than they actually do. So I can see why smelling something very strong like cheese with your full sense of smell restored would be quite a shock!
At one of my first jobs in an office, everyone had an ashtray at their desk and there was always someone smoking at any given time throughout the day. Same with the breakroom. Sometime around then was when they started making people go to the breakroom to smoke, then a few years later it moved to having to go outside, which just meant walking through the cloud of smoke surrounding the door to get inside. Well, at least one thing has changed for the better since then. 😄
Altria, formerly Philip Morris, still allows smoking in their buildings as of a few years ago. It’s trippy to book a non-smoking room in the 2020s.
You can also just take a trip to the Waffle House off I-95 in Florence, SC. It allowed smoking when I was there in 2014 and probably still does.
Well they literally get killed for asking.
There’s a small city in the Kansas City, Missouri metro (Raytown) that lobbied to keep it legal in restaurants and bars. I just looked it up, and apparently it’s fine to smoke weed as of 2023, too
Even as a kid I always liked the smell
And the cold tobacco doesn’t bother me either
However there’s one tobacco smell I don’t like, when someone smoked a cigaret (in cold weather) very fast before boarding the train/bus. It’s a very strong, musky smell
There are worse smells, like murdered animals on a fire.
Oh, piss off, dude. We get it. You don’t eat meat and you want to argue about it with strangers on a post that has nothing at all to do with the topic. Virtue signaling as a replacement for a personality.
Best summer smell. The smell of quality cow flesh slowly cooking over an open flame is one of the best.
When I went vegan I moved to a place where I have to pass a Burger King on the way home. That greasy tallow smell is so nasty every time I pass it.
It’s sad when you first smell the herbs, not realizing it yet.
I’d really prefer to have people smoke around me than to randomly smell something that hurts my feelings.
My coworker is also vegan. One of the people we worked with is this man who can be super nasty, and then turn around and do something nice for you. Without getting into the specifics he’s highly manipulative. Anyway, he had been yelling at her the day before her birthday, and the day of her birthday he shows up with a cake for her, NOT vegan, and wishes her happy birthday and tells her he didn’t have a chance to get a vegan cake. So he really put her on the spot, and cut her a slice and handed it to her, and so she had to sort of pick at the whipped cream icing to be polite because he was standing there watching her. Carnists really love to do shit like that.
They are not on fire. They are just boiling in their own fat. MMMMMMMmmmmmm, fat.
Horrid
Qm i in the wrong thread? I thought this was about smoking, not veganism.
Also once about eight years ago I was in Kentucky doing the bourbon trail. It’s pretty rural aside from the distilleries, and finding somewhere to eat lunch on Sunday was hard as almost everything is closed, we ended up at some place they called a bourbon gastropub, but that meant that the dining room side was the only part fit to eat in, but all that was open was the horrible bar which was made of raw particle board, and there were members of the Klan sitting at it, who had the leather vests with the blood drop cross. There was literally nowhere else to eat so we ordered, but I felt terrified the whole time, and as we were wrapping up one of the Klan lit a cigarette at the bar and just sat there, and nobody said anything. It was quite stunning.
Crazy that these places still exist, but I guess not that surprising.
Wish I could still buy one of those.
Yeah, it was weird. Most restaurants had a non-smoking section because allowing people to smoke everywhere was the norm. Leaded gasoline. Little kids playing with real fireworks. The 70s and 80s were a wild ride of irresponsibility.
It wasn’t all bad, though. It was cool being a kid at times. Playing outside almost every day until dinner time with the other kids in the neighborhood.
As a child of the 70s/80s, although I don’t remember a great deal of the 70s, your parents had no idea where you were until you came home when the streetlights went on, unless you happened to call from a friend’s house to ask if you could sleep over. I remember my friend getting run over by a car which broke her leg because there was no crossing guard on the busy street where the kids had to cross to go to school, and after that they hired one. I lived up the street from the school, and had a cat that went outside, on hot days the front doors were always open and sometimes she’d go nap in the library or show up in my classroom. Then the neighbour who hates animals and had lost his teaching job for exposing himself to students abducted her and dumped her way across town, but someone found her and put an ad in the list and found section of the paper so I got her back.
That poor cat went through so much.
She was happy as can be and loved visiting.
From my experience, it’s always been the other way around. There usually were small smoking sections partitioned away from the rest of the restaurant. This was the norm. And it was usually a fraction of the tables compared to the non-smoking sections.
Source: Worked as a server through most of the 80’s-90’s.
Non smoking section with like an 18 inch wall separating it from the smoking section. My mom almost got into a fistfight at a couple of restaurants for seating us directly next to the smoking section instead of in the opposite corner with less secondhand smoke.
In most restaurants I saw there was no wall in between.
In most restaurants I saw there was no wall in between.
This was my experience as well. I can still see it today in some older restaurants that haven’t been renovated in years, where there’s an area of the dining room with a much higher ceiling.
And it was usually next to the kitchen and the restrooms. Worst tables all around.
No one can win on this one.
Seat the smokers in back and “oh no, I have to sit next to the kitchen and restroom.”
Seat the smokers in front and “oh no, I have to walk through the smoking section to get to or from my seat, or go to the restroom.”
Or at least that’s how Denny’s was setup in our town.
I don’t know how it was in the U.S., but where I’m from it was like 10% of the seats only, so even if they put it all on good seats, there would still be plenty of good seats for smokers.
Don’t forget no cell phones. It’s hard to overstate the (I believe negative) impact constant connection and notification has had on every aspect of our lives
Some boomer on Facebook recently posted a meme with a photo of a rotary phone and how those were better days, and I had to laugh because they decidedly weren’t. When we had no answering machine or call waiting, and had to hang around for phone calls that might come, or have the car break down on the side of the road and hope that someone would stop and help you and that they weren’t a serial killer, that was purely awful. We actually had a serial killer couple abducting and killing teenage girls in my city before cell phones existed, and they made tapes of them raping and torturing these girls before they killed them. A cell phone would probably have helped them a lot.
There also weren’t people broadcasting mass shootings live on Facebook and inspiring copycat shootings, or being indoctrinated into incel culture alone in their bedrooms. There are legitimate pros and legitimate cons to 24/7 connection, this isn’t just some “boomer yells at the sky” thing
That’s why I would say that cell phones are fine. It’s when they turned into smartphones where I would draw the line. I just get the feeling that we’d be a lot better off if mobile phone tech never advanced much further than the mid-2000’s flip phone.
YES. Flip phones were fine and were enough to handle all the problems mentioned about pre-cellphones. Calls, texts, voice mail. All the new problems mentioned are caused BY smartphones. If the meme showed a Nokia flip phone it would have been perfect.
Totally agree with this
It’s just I went to one of the victim’s funerals. I’ll never feel nostalgic for those days as a result.
It’s decidedly worse for mental health. Despite living in the safest times in living memory, we are biased to think our cities are dangerous and economies are failing because of doomscrolling and the dominance of online news.
They had smoking/non-smoking sections into the 90s and early 2000s in Texas. I remember very clearly that my parents would have to ask for seats away from the bar if the restaurant had one, because they almost always allowed smoking. Also hotel rooms being smoking/non-smoking, and you could tell when a hotel was cheap and just swapped the door sign.
Little kids playing with real fireworks.
In the early 2000s as teenagers we’d go play in the town with bags of fireworks on new year lmao
My neighbour smokes indoors. When she opens the door, I get the smell you are talking about.
My aunt smoked two packs a day, in the house, and when I visited I had to wear clothes I was ready to throw away, had to strip and shower when I got home, and once in the space of an hour she smoked seven cigarettes and finally one of my eyes swelled shut, and she demanded to know why I didn’t say anything. My husband pointed out the walls were yellow with tobacco, she lived in the house she grew up in and all the furniture was the same as when she was a child. When she died it all had to be junked, despite some of it probably being antique.
When she died it all had to be junked
The tar might have helped it burn better
Born in early 90’s. We were still responding “non” to the first question that was asked entering a restaurant.
Try working in a restaurant. I worked as a server for awhile, right at the tail end of when they still had smoking and nonsmoking sections. It was awful.
Grew up in Asia. The less fancy one. Used to go buy my Dad cigarettes from across the street and toss out the filters when I was like 8 lol.
*He’s been smoke free for over 22 years. The amount of disinformation from Big tobacco, at least where I grew up, was insane. He is a very educated man and still… Cigarette was a status symbol, symbol of sophistication, when he was growing up.
The smells haven’t gone away, you’re just acclimated now
Now they all smell like weed. I actually wish people who smoked weed were more attentive to how they stink, because it’s also very gross.
going to the grocery store and seeing an employee with a big dust-mop going up and down the aisles pushing along an ever-growing pile of cigarette butts because everyone would just drop 'em and step on 'em and keep on shopping…
Well, now the streets just smell like weed instead.
Yeah weed easily smells at least as bad
Nah, I almost enjoy that. Rolling tobacco is about tolerable. Actual cigarettes make me sick
It’s been noticably bad after legalization. I don’t care if you enjoy weed, but you gotta admit there is a reason people compare its smell to skunks.
Dont worry americans if you want to smell smoke 24/7 just come to france or eastern europe.
Hit the ground in Germany, bombarded by smokers almost instantaneously.
That surprises me, but noted !
I went to Italy last year and the outdoor seating of restaurants probably had a solid millimetre thick later of tobacco all over
Germany is worse than France ime.
Hmm ive been to a lot of european countries quite a few times and france seemed like the worst out of the high income/western ones. The worst is still hungary(where i grew up) where its absolutely horrible and we also have the highest rate of lung cancer. Smoking is literally a cancer to society. The best in terms of smoking is sweden where i live now, everyone uses snus which is better for both the users and bystanders because theres no smoke, its just a nicotine packet they put in their mouth.
