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Peeve of the Week: Addiction

December 5, 2008
It was ugly, and quite frankly shocking too.  The tenants with whom I share my floor decided that it was too much to go outside to smoke.  They recently moved from downstairs to upstairs, which means they now work on the other side of a wall that divides our offices, instead of underneath us on the ground floor where they used to be.  Now mind you, this is a group of people with whom I’ve enjoyed warm, positive and respectful relationships for the five years that we’ve been in the same building.  So naturally, I thought when I politely asked that they not smoke “upstairs” because we were feeling it in our throats, lungs and stomachs, that they’d be sensitive not only to the whole “second hand smoke thing” but also to the fact that it’s illegal to smoke in commercial space.   Their cooperation was reflected in their words, “Yeah, OK Donna, we’ll stop.  Sorry.”   But they didn’t stop.  In fact, it got worse.  Sometimes there would even be a whole room full of people chain smoking.  It was disgusting.  So I went back over.  Perplexed, I asked if I’d somehow been unclear on my first visit and this time pleaded that they not subject us to the smoke, but simply walk down one flight of steps where they could be outside and smoke their brains out if they wanted to.  This time, one of the two biggest culprits promised he would never smoke in our offices again and the other looked me straight in the eye and said he’d decided to ignore us.  What?  Who does that?  If it was so important that they be allowed to smoke, why not get offices that they didn’t have to share and could therefore do whatever they wanted?  I suppose that would have been too inconvenient.  So why not simply inconvenience everyone else?  Meanwhile, they all kept smoking. 

So what does one do?  I had no control, so I couldn’t fire them.  Reasoning didn’t work.  Begging didn’t work. Appealing to their “good side” and conscience didn’t work. I even said that I didn’t want our good relationships to be strained because of something so stupid.  But they didn’t care.  They didn’t care that they were making others feel sick.  They didn’t care that one of their own employees had voiced her concern because she has asthma.  They didn’t care that the owner didn’t want smoke in his space.  They just kept puffing away.  They didn’t care that there is a law against it – for good reason!  They didn’t care about anyone but themselves and their cigarettes.  Did I need emphysema, or bronchitis, or lung cancer for them to show any sort of consideration?  No, because it wouldn’t have mattered.  They only saw themselves and their compulsive need to keep dragging on those fags. 

Granted it’s not uncommon for all sorts of businesses to experience these kinds of inter-relational conflicts that arise from fundamental differences between people.  However, it is rather unusual for people to flat-out refuse to do something – especially when valid arguments can be made that those people are clearly in the wrong from whichever way you look at it.  I was disappointed when I realized that the only tactic capable of persuading them was one more akin to my mom and dad's parenting strategies than to that of what typically should work within professional environments with adults.  It was to determine what matters to them most and then find the person who has the power to take it away.  So since the landlord could termindate the lease and my neighbors did not want to move, the threat to kick them out worked every bit as well as my parents’ threat to unplug my phone and take it away when I was a teenager.  Disheartening as that may be, I guess sometimes it is necessary to revert to high school disciplinary measures in order to motivate a bunch of grown ups to do the right thing.

Posted by Donna Flagg on December 5, 2008 | Comments (2)