Smoking Ban

Aye aye!

Here's an article i picked up from The New Paper, 15 July 2006. It was a highly entertaining article about the recent smoking ban in coffeeshops.

Written by Edwin Yeo, he offers his views on the ban, and at the end of the article, he reveals a very startling fact. Startling, yet true to this very day.

Read everything that is written and hopefully u enjoy the article as much as i did.

............... The New Paper, Saturday, 15 July 2005 - by Edwin Yeo ..............

For the last two weeks, I've felt unwanted. Not because I was again rejected when I tried to pick up that hot chick at the bar(I'm used to that), but because of my smoking habit.

While my fellow scribe Adam Hashidy might jump up and shout like Fred Flintstone at Singapore's new smoking regulations, it's made me feel like a pariah.

I used to enjoy my cup of overpriced coffee at coffee joints, light up a cigarette and imagined that I looked cool.

Disgusting habit, non-smokers say, but I've never bothered them, hor have they suffered the terrible effects of passive smoking. These joints, you see, already have non-smoking indoor areas, where they enjoy not having their lungs polluted, and air-conditioning too.

The new smoking ban, however, insists that onli 20 per cent of the outdoor area can be designated a smoking corner. Smokers have to huddle together in one tiny area to keep the rest of the outdoor area smoke-free. Not that it does.

This might shock some non-smokers who can't wait to rub the law into our faces, but at the point of writing this, the F&B establishments have yet to erect invisible forcefields around the smoking area to prevent our smoke from being blown into the non-smoking areas.

Rush For Smoking Corner

Here's a common scenario at coffee joints: The smoking corner is always full. Other smokers wait near the corner, repressing the urge to light up.

The moment someone leaves the smoking corner, someone else rushes for the empty table. I myself had to kill a few smokers trying to get the table.

The silly thing is the other 80 per cent of the outdoor seats, usually filled before the ban, are almost all empty now.

Where are the non-smokers who have been waiting for this day so they can finally enjoy smoke-free posing at the al fresco area? In the same air-conditioned comfort they have always been enjoying, that's where.

I didn't call up these joints to check of their business has suffered since the new laws were introduced, but I would bet my friends' World Cup winnings that it has.

Pkay, I've done my rant. I'll leave you something from the dead but immortal stand-up comic Bill Hicks, a chain smoker who died of a non-smoking related illness.

To his audience, he revealed a fact startling onto non-smokers only. So similarly, this is for Adam and non-smokers.

Neither Hicks nor I researched this fact, but I'm fairly sure this is an absolute truth. Ready? Are you seated, non-smokers?

Non-smokers die everyday.