i remember ashtrays on the arm of every airplane seat!
Until she left home, my wife didn’t realise that normal non-smoking households don’t have to mop their walls.
Omigod.
We had to do this with our first house. Former tenants were 2 pack a day each with kids in The house. The water cascaded down completely brown.
My wife’s parents used to smoke heavily. She tells me how they had to clean the windows monthly just to be able to see out of them
Gross, even in my chain-smoking days I never smoked indoors.
When I was a kid the old people in my family all chain smoked when we went out to eat. I hated eating with them because of that. I seriously thought my aunt was 15 years older than my mom because of her chain smoking and alcoholism aged her. Found out after she died she was only 3 years older.
What I remember most is coming back from concerts reeking of cigarettes and having to immediately throw my clothes in the wash and take a shower. Going to shows got so much more enjoyable after they banned indoor smoking at clubs.
Ashtrays everywhere. Companies marketing for kids who proudly make massive branded ashtrays, like McDonalds.
At least the ashtrays can still be used, one of my buddies uses them for coasters and I want to use one for screws when I work on stuff.
Even just going to a restaurant or bar got so much more enjoyable.
When I was maybe 3 (maybe 4 - it’s a little fuzzy), I remember safety pinning a towel around the collar of my shirt so I could be like Superman (we had recently seen it in the theater). The towel also had frayed ends, and ended up in the ashtray along side my mom’s cigarette. I remember my mom panicking trying to get those safety pins off when the towel caught fire. We never were allowed to safety pin towels to our clothes again after that. 😂
Also I love how my kids know the cigarette lighter in the car as a place to plug in a car charger and nothing else.
Cigarette lighter? You mean the finger print eraser and “lesson enforcer”? It was always empty when I grew up, seems like every child needed to learn that it was still hot even after the glow had vanished :)
The bic type lighter where everywhere, including in the coin shelf in cars
I still have a bic lighter, and I quit smoke 10 years ago. Never know when it’ll come in handy.
I also remember when there were cigarette vending machines in restaurants. $1.25/pack and no age verification. 😉
I still have a bic lighter, and I quit smoke 10 years ago. Never know when it’ll come in handy.
We got one from a gas station for lighting birthday candles. I just got a firepit and went to use it to start a fire and realized I’ve never used one before and had to try a lot of times to actually get it to light.
They’re pretty shit for lighting anything that’s not cigarettes or similar. They burn the fuck out of your finger if held any orientation but vertical which makes lighting a campfire annoying. Gotta light the kindling in your hand then place it under the wood once lit.
Yep. The 80’s were absolutely horrible if you were bothered by smoke. There’s a reason why a lot of us 80’s kids “had asthma”, which magically disappeared when everything went non-smoking in the 90’s.
Smoking was just so pervasive here in Europe in the 80’s, it’s impossible for people to understand if you didn’t experience it first hand.
Like, even teachers smoked. Not in lessons, but if they were out in the playground supervising, or in the staff room, they’d light up.
My headteacher had a pipe. I think it was about the only thing that kept him going, right up until the cancer got him.
Also in lessons. I had a teacher that would open the outside door of the classroom (leading to a garden) to stand there smoking. Not that it helped because we still got a good whiff of the smoke.
This was around 1995 probably.
Part of the reason kids have asthma from that era, myself included, is because our mothers smoked while pregnant.
disappeared when everything went non-smoking in the 90’s.
Funny, in Russia that transition happened around late 00s.
A-and in 2014 entrance to my (then) uni territory still looked like one big stinking cloud of smoke and a barely visible group of students smoking just outside, some coming, some leaving.
Fun fact: instead of cupholders, 1970s cars would proudly advertise the number of ashtrays they had equipped the car with, usually 1 within reach of every seat. This number was equally important as horsepower or price on marketing materials.
Someday when beverages are a thing of the past, people will be aghast that cars ever advertised their drink holders.
Yes, someday we will all ingest nothing but crumbly dry blocks of nutrient fuel, and scoff at those who used to slurp up liquids like a meat mosquito.
Someday when beverages are a thing of the past, people will be aghast that cars ever advertised their drink holders.
But then where will I put my water bottle?
I remember this!
The flip side is that now that cars have zero ashtrays, most smokers just throw the butts out the window.
I have a 2015 car. Imagine my surprise to find that it has front and rear ashtrays. I hadn’t seen an ashtray in a car since probably the early nineties. I remember for a while after the ashtrays stopped being standard that you could order a “smoker’s package” to get them, but I thought that option had long since gone away.
I have a Trabant, a car from East Germany that was made pretty much as cheap as possible. Still has ash trays front and back.
I remember that in pre-school in around 1990 we made clay ashtrays for father’s day. My father did not smoke but they told me to make one anyway…
…my high school phased out the student smoking area starting my freshman year in 1986: the older classes still had access, but not mine, and by 1990 it was fully decommissioned into a landscaped atrium…
…when i worked as an apartment groundskeeper in the early nineties, my first two hours of every day were spent cleaning cigarette butts throughout the complex…
Did the kids just smoke somewhere else?
I don’t think we had an official smoking section but there was always a big crowd in the parking lot (early 2000s)
…i know people smoked off-campus but i’m pretty sure it was verbotten anywhere on-campus for students my age and younger: i was resolutely accosted by faculty for wielding a convincing fake cigarette in the parking lot after-hours…
I also made one. But mainly out of choice. My parents didn’t even smoke. I guess I was weird that way.
I still regularly marvel about how great it is not to have to quarantine my clothes and have a shower as soon as I come home from the pub or restaurant, and it has been 20 years since it was banned around here.
I went on a road trip a few years ago and we went to a bar… somewhere along the mid Atlantic. Maybe Virginia or one of the Carolinas, and people are smoking at the bar, and I felt like I had just landed on a different planet. Like… I had almost forgotten people still smoked at all, let alone a dozen people puffing away in a small barroom.
We got pretty drunk and had a good time though. But then when I took a shower in the morning, it was like all that smoke residue was oozing out of my pores and hair. Being hungover and having a steamy, cigarette-smelling shower did not start the day off well.
Same. I’m so sensitive to smoke I will run away from anyone smoking in my vicinity even outdoors.
sometimes though, the bars smell like piss. i think id take cig smoke smell to piss smell
If your bar smells like piss, maybe it’s time to go to a different bar.
I’m old enough to remember when smoking was banned in bars/clubs in the UK. It went from a musky smell to body odour, and it took practically all venues by surprise.
Now, I’m so glad that indoors smoking was banned. Looking back, it was fucking gross, and while sadly lots of people now vape indoors it was a huge improvement to basically be able to actually breathe in those places.
I came to Ireland when they just banned smoking and it was still legal in Germany. The first time I walked into a pub and ran against a solid wall of sweat and beer farts I missed smoking.
Seriously this! I grew up poor so going to restaurants was a 2-3 times a year thing. And as a kid, going to one meant non-smoking area, where the nasty ass smoke would still waffle over. And my eyes would get irritated, id get really sick and cough nonstop for days.
It didn’t even notice the coincidence until it happened to me at a friend’s house in college who was also a heavy smoker.
In the US, I lived in a state that went non-smoking and later a city in another state that did. B.O. mixed with mold and a hint of piss is what it ended up smelling like.
I wonder how much that affected the life expectancy of those kids
Quite a lot. Most mothers smoked while pregnant and gave their kids asthma as a result, and ADHD too. That’s why you see more of that.
My mom quit smoking before pregnancy, and dad never smoked. Still neurodivergent. I’ve not personally heard of a causal link there before.
Thanks, but, uh:
CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that the association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring ADHD is not due to causal intrauterine effects, but reflects unmeasured confounding.
ADHD too. That’s why you see more of that.
Citation needed!
Invalid URL?
Fuck smoking.
Aww man you’re gonna make me want to start again.
Drink smoking, fresh air smoking, adderall smoking, coffee smoking, drive smoking, fuck smoking.
dont forget after a good meal smoking and after sex smoking
I remember bars so blue with smoke you couldn’t see across the room.
Oh good I’m still youngish I AM old enough that I remember being really excited when the headlines on our newspaper said smoking was banned indoors! Not even a “smoking” section in a restaurant anymore unless it was patio/outdoors maybe
I remember huge arguments about whether or not smoking was allowed during team meetings. Not in your office, that was presumed just fine.
The day they banned smoking in bars/restaurants was glorious. No more trying to decide if it was OK to wear something that required dry cleaning.
Taking an international flight where half the plane is smoking. Those were good times, especially in Greece where they loved smoking even more than the Americans.
I read a lot of Southeast Asian countries still smoke everywhere. And I can’t imagine being cramped in a small area with a nasty ass smoker without flipping out.
Actually, air was cleaner back when smoking was allowed on flights. They had to completely recycle all the air in the cabin where nowadays it’s all a closed system. Every fart and cough, every armpit outgassing and nasty crotch reek is with you from takeoff to touchdown now.
Most of you won’t believe me so I suggest you look it up yourself before downvoting (which you won’t).
I moved to São Paulo recently and discovered that people here still smoke on clubs. Is disgusting coming back from party with the hair and clothes smelling like cigarettes.
My wife is from an Eastern European country, and whenever we visit her folks I have a similar experience. Every single restaurant reeks of smoke, and there is apparently no political appetite to change that.
The funny thing about cigarettes is they kill lots of appetites by providing such ready dopamine release.
Apparently many states in Germany have smoking in pubs too . It’s so nasty. Makes me actually ill to be around a smoker.
