No smoke for you!
With each act of legislation that further dehumanizes us smokers, I become more and more cranky about bumming cigarettes to mooches. My basic rule is that someone I know can usually get one without too much grief. A request for a second will usually lead me to let the person asking (again) know that I really don’t want to give them another. And, no, don’t even bother asking for a third.
The newly imposed federal tax was bad enough, pushing a pack over five bucks in the ‘burbs where I live. Go into Chicago, and I can’t imagine what a pack there costs. I usually go downtown well prepared, seeing as the city also has suffered from the hike in Cook County. I imagine a pack there costs nearly $10.
So, by my count, with 20 cigarettes per pack, if a homeless man or any other pedestrian I encounter asks for one free smoke, I now offer them two for a dollar. That’s a pretty fair trade in my mind, but if they don’t think so, well, go ask somebody else, I guess.
Meet one of our daytime bartenders, a girl who usually relies on the cigarettes her boyfriend rolls at home. Well, that’s what she says. In truth, I’ve never seen her smoke one of these homemade cigarettes because every single shift she works, without fail, she immediately approaches me following the lunch rush to ask me for a cigarette.
And a lighter.
“I’ll buy you a pack, I swear,” she tells other waitresses, I’m told, although nobody has yet received said pack. I’ve never been made such an offer, but for a brief while I did manage to get her to agree to my newly created pair of smokes for a buck. She went along with it for a while, but now it appears she’s once again gone back to just looking for a single freebie from me.
Obviously, my dislike for her repeated, annoying requests only grows stronger each time she asks. And now that I know every other smoker I work with has also grown tired of this shameless begging, I’m now rescinding the policy I have personally set in place for trips to Chicago. No, from now on when this waitress asks me to once again cough up a square for her, I’m going to instead cough into my hand and simply say, “I’ve only got one left.”
We can all understand the occasional absent-mindedness that occurs when we arrive at work only to realize we didn’t bring enough cigarettes, but such repeated requests without ever apparently purchasing a pack of her own has now caused my sympathy for this fellow smoker to evaporate. It’s almost as if she’s a phony, pretending to be one of us but never really showing the commitment to the addiction we all have.
If anything, I think that next time I’m just going to suggest that the girl finally quits, seeing as she can’t even muster up the initiative to really start on her own.
