Ask Lemmy

Same way we're doing smog?

Oh god, the bowling alleys. The stink of cigarettes, soggy fried food, and machine oil that didn't just destroy your clothes, but actually permeated your soul.

Both of my parents smoked. My two brothers and I would take a pair of scissors and cut the cigarette in front of their faces when they would go and light up.

I don't remember how long it took to get them to quit, but they finally did.

It's just not the health aspect, but smoking is just absolutely disgusting. A smoker just stinks to high heaven and they make everything around them stink long after they leave. How they are not completely mortified by that, I will never know.

Then add the expense and the deleterious health impact.

It begs the question...

What the actual fuck?

We couldn't go anywhere. This continued well into the 2000s when I was a kid, and I had (mild) asthma. We only went out to eat when it was warm enough to sit outside, and I only ever went to take your kid to work day once.

Oh, and I remember riding in the back sear of my grandmothers car when she lit up and cracked the window. I stuffed my head under her seat so I could breathe marginally cleaner air until we got wherever we were going.

If you didn't have asthma, it was just unpleasant and you put up with it. And probably burned your clothes after visiting a nursing home or bar.

My Grandpa had one of those full size Chevy conversion vans with a sofa/bed in the back. I have very specific memories of opening the back window vent which was a mesh screen, and sticking my face on it as a child so that I could breathe the outside fresh air rather than his smoke.

Loved that man, but that probably wasn't the best thing to expose a young child to every day.

We were just used to it, even as non-smokers. I grew up with my Dad always smoking and just always recognized the smell, but it was just so common that I didn't think anything of it. It wasn't until my state banned indoor smoking that it really hit me how everpresent it had been. It was like a few weeks after the ban went into effect that I really noticed it like, "Holy shit, I never realized how much I hate that smoke, it's so much better now!" I was working at a bar/restaurant at the time, so it just cleared the fucking place up and I was so happy.

We just sat in the non-smoking section.

Cigarette smoke is very clever and is sure to respect a small piece of red rope strung across the restaurant.

And the real answer is we were all just used to the smell of cigarettes. Going for a meal or going to see grandad? Put on some old clothes that can be put in the washing when you come home because they'll stink. It never seemed to occur to anyone that they could just stop letting people smoke indoors.

Australian guy here

Didn't go out much and did lots of outdoor activities.. When I first started work it was allowed in work vehicles, that stopped after about 2 years.

Stillnallowed in lunch rooms etc.so I ate outside or at my desk. Did not go to restaurants etc becase of the smoking, flew on an Air France flight once from Miami to Paria and it had smoking, no escape, fuck that was bad, still remember it decades later :)

My Dad said it was shocking when he was working (he's long dead and would have been about 85 if we was still living, he was a non smoker)

Well at that age I was a baby so I was mostly close to the floor

We bowled a lot

Workplaces were the worst, I kept catching other people's second hand smoke at work. Worst was when I went to an encounter group type thing and a guy was smoking and I got a faceful.... and bronchitis for the rest of the trip. And that was in the 90's

At least in my own home and car I could set the rules and rules was take that shit outside

You are talking to the survivors.

God only knows how. Any time I went somewhere with my parents the car windows were up, the aircon was off and they were both chain smoking.

They both died of smoking-related illnesses.

You washed your clothes a lot. And even worse for girls with long hair.

You would skip restaurants during busy times.

Sometimes you would carry an extra jacket in your car trunk to put on when going into a smokey place, so you could take it off and hopefully not have too much smoke smell on you if you weren't going to shower soon.

A lot of people didn’t.

Don't forget the smog and pot smoke. We grew gills back then.

My father gets headaches if he’s around smoke for more than a few minutes. One thing this lead to is avoiding restaurants at peak hours. So when I was a kid if we ate out we always went at 11;00 for lunch or about 5:00 for dinner. The idea was to be out before the people in the smoking section had time to light up their after meal cig. Of course occasionally you’d get the before meal cig too.

But as a result even 20 years after smoking in restaurants was banned where I live all of my family is in the habit of eating early.

You can get a feel of it by being around a lot of fragrances. You know the people who are noseblind so wear a lot of perfume/cologne. They putting on fragrances in their lotions or other stuff. Their house and/or car reeks but they barely notice. Same feel and they don't even notice the smell, it normal to them. Their kids and pets are getting sick and they don't care. I forgot to add that you are considering the problem if you bring it up.

I grew up in a small town, and when I was 17, I signed up for the volunteer fire department in town. Part of the in-processing was getting a chest x-ray so they knew how fucked your lungs were before any exposure related to the position. Nurse asked me how much I smoked and thought I was lying when I (truthfully) said I didn't. She said my lungs looked like I'd been smoking at least a pack a day for at least a year.

My mom and every step-dad smoked like chimneys, spent a lot of my childhood in bars when smoking indoors was still legal. I don't know if the nurse was exaggerating the results, and I don't have a copy of the x-ray from back then. I also picked up the habit myself around 20 in the military and smoked a pack to 2 a day until we found out my wife was pregnant with our first kid. We both quit cold turkey that day. I assume I'll have lung or skin cancer at some point between all that childhood exposure, the damage I did to myself smoking for a decade, the aircraft fumes, and burn pit exposure from the military...and we didn't worry about sunscreen like we should have in the 80s/90s either.

It really sucked when people could smoke anywhere. I remember so many times when I was at a restaurant just starting into a nice meal and suddenly all I could smell or taste was cigarette (or cigar) smoke. It was gross.

I also remember when airlines had a smoking section, which was usually the back several rows. I remember asking for a seat in the non-smoking section, and the one I got was one row in front of the smoking section; there was probably more smoke there than in the last row of the smoking section.