As the smoke clears, one man carries the torch

As smoking bans sweep across the world, turning those once deemed the kings of cool into social pariahs, a reassuring trickle of amusing stories seep through the fundament. In Britain, readers may remember the good people of Stoke-on-Trent who, due to an administrative error, remained defiantly unhealthy for several weeks more than the rest of the country. As the smoking ban bites in Germany, an exception much like the one for restaurants in Portugal is causing friction. Small offices are allowed the freedom to smoke – a surprising measure. Germany has been pro-worker for years, but usually this means pro-healthy, and pro-doom for the economy. Perhaps the top brass of their powerful unions are littered with inveterate smokers, determined to pass on the right to contract lung and heart disease into the next generation.

One small office in particular looms out of the news fog, a telemarketing firm in Büsum, north Germany, spearheaded by fanatical smoker Thomas Jensen, who had this to say about the three workers he fired for not joining in the office habit:

“Our non-smoking employees were actually convinced that they had the right to smoke-free zones. They just complained all the time about smoking, and I don’t like grumblers .…We’re on the phone all the time and it’s just easier to work while smoking. Everyone’s always beating up on smokers, but now the shoe’s on the other foot.”

The ban has provoked extreme responses elsewhere in Germany, even comparisons with the persecution of the Jews, which demonstrate a worryingly slim grasp of history, but this is clearly the voice of a man with an addiction. Saying it is easier to work while smoking is like saying it is easier to juggle with one hand. It is only easier than going outside and stopping working, unless these people are seasoned pros, accomplished smokers who need only to light the cigarette and then let it drop from their mouths when smoked clean, to be swept up and extinguished by a small army of robot cleaners. Still, this is a telemarketing firm – anyone who has ever worked at one will know that the pleasures are few and far between. Let the poor devils have their smoke.

A certain romanticism persists around cigarettes, and there is something comforting in knowing that these islands of anarchy can exist, even if being in the midst of them would make you choke. In France, SNCF seems to be asking for trouble with the plans for ‘party trains’ where passengers will be encouraged to ‘do anything they like so long as it is decent’. Despite a form of musical chairs being encouraged to facilitate conversation near the dance area, there will be, it is understood, absolutely no flirting. We imagine it differently.