Riding the motorbike home through North Albany on Sunday evening, I noticed a sight I’d seen a number of times before on rides, runs or walks in that area: A person or persons hanging out back of one of the eateries, smoking.
OK, I have no real desire to vilify smokers any more than 21st century American society already has, but I must say it just looks sort of bad to have these workers standing or sitting around and puffing away, especially, for reasons I can’t fully explain, when the business in question is a restaurant.
If I were the owner and had smokers on my staff — which in all honesty I would probably try not to — I would aim to figure out a place for them to take their smoke breaks in such a way and place that it didn’t make them look like loiterers outside our own establishment.
I should point out, in the interest of fairness and full disclosure, that at times some of my DH co-workers take on that loitering appearance while satisfying their tobacco/nicotine habit. I respect everyone’s right to smoke but only as long as it doesn’t have a negative affect on anyone, including an employer.
Is it a huge deal that people visit our small, side parking lot or loading dock area for a cigarette or two? No, it’s not. Is it a good look for our company to people who drive past? Probably not. But it’s not up to me to change things up, and as I said, it’s really not an enormous deal.
The worst example of loitering smokers that I can think of are the throngs who gather outside the Old Armory Building in downtown Albany a couple blocks west of the DH.
The building houses a collection of public agencies, and the clients of at least one of them seem to be young people who are extremely passionate about tobacco. They regularly stand on the sidewalk in a group of a dozen or so, and the gray haze wafting skyward is an impressive sight in sort of a perverse way.
One last thought on this subject for now: Look for Monroe Avenue and the other streets that ring the OSU campus to be jam-packed with smokers beginning next fall when the campus goes smoke free. btw, I’m about as anti-smoking as it gets, but the campus-wide ban on smoking seems a bit much even to me.