The Email

Something Different

This mornings blog post is going to be a bit out of character for me.  Mainly I am going ahead and posting it for a few reasons.  Firstly I think there are things to be learned from this, both in the fact that speaking your mind and standing up for something can have a positive effect.  Secondly I think it is also a good reminder that your actions can have unintended consequences, and that each of us has more of an effect on others than we really realize on a daily basis.  With all of that setup, now I actually have to talk about the meat of the issue.

I am a severe asthmatic, we have known this since the days of my parents racing me to the doctors office late at night to get a cortisone shot to help me breathe.  My dad was also a pretty severe asthmatic and he tells tales of having to go to the hospital and sleep in an oxygen tent as a child.  This is just one of the many things I have dealt with my entire life, and normally I do just fine.  However there are a few things, cigarette smoke and really strong perfume that can have extremely adverse effects on my overall health.  I tend to be one of those “chain reaction” people, that once it starts it is really hard to stop and I have ended up in the hospital in the past.

With the frigid conditions, our smokers have been less rigid to smoking where they are supposed to be smoking.  Usually when this is outside and well ventilated this is not really a problem.  However a group of smokers has been taking to smoking in the 6th floor vestibule in the parking garage.  I call it a vestibule because I really have no other words for it.  Basically it is a glassed in hut of sorts with no real ventilation that serves to cover the top of the elevators.  It looks more like a green house than anything, but as smokers congregate there it fills with smoke and I find myself trying desperately not to breathe while waiting on the elevator.  They tend to hang out in the stairwell so going down the stairs would be even worse of an experience.

Yesterday I reached a breaking point of sorts.  My lungs have been in extremely bad shape thanks to having to breathe all the cold dry air, so I was not really sure how much more I could take before ending up on that downward spiral that leads to hospitalization myself.  The two individuals that were smoking when I walked in yesterday morning were both friends of mine or at the very least people I was on very familiar terms.  So I thought about how to let them know how their actions were effecting me.  I decided upon a quiet email, just to explain the effect that smoke has on me.  I could have of course called down the wrath of the HR department on them… since they were not smoking where they were supposed to.  Instead of doing something aggressive like that, I wanted to appeal to their humanity.

The Email

Here is the email I wrote to them.  I tried my best to just put it out there plainly, and avoid being passive aggressive or anything of the sort.  You can be the judge if I actually succeeded.

So normally I am pretty chill about things, and try not to complain, but is there any way you two can smoke someplace other than the level 6 parking garage vestibule?  I realize it is frigid outside, but I just wanted to take a moment to explain to you both what your smoking does to me.  I’ve struggled with severe asthma my entire life.  Most of the time I am able to maintain without much issue, but I have a number of triggers the biggest of them being cigarette smoke.  When I breathe in even a few minutes worth of smoke it triggers a chain reaction in my body that may or may not be halted by the use of my inhaler.  Right now with the cold weather my lungs are already in pretty bad shape, so as I dart in from my car in the morning I have to try my best not to breathe in at all as I cross through the enclosed 6th floor vestibule.
 
For me at least it is far more than an inconvenience.  I have been hospitalized because I breathed only a little bit of smoke.  The neighbors down the street had a house fire, and being good neighbors I went by the house for only long enough to grab their prescriptions so that I could run by Walgreens and pick up replacements for them.  That was enough exposure to smoke to send me to the hospital for five days missing the 2005 thanksgiving holiday.  Like I said most of the time I can maintain my health, but with the extreme damage the cold does to my lungs…  your cigarette smoke may just act as the final straw when my lungs go down into total lockdown mode.
 
As I said, normally I don’t complain but given the bad condition my lungs are in already… I wanted to take a moment just so that you would realize that your smoking does have an effect on someone other than yourselves.

So I sent the email and waited.  I let my boss know I had done so just to make sure he was in the loop in case any fallout occurred from it.  There are people on our floor that would have stormed off madder than a hornet that I was somehow trying to impute their rights.  However these two individuals I thought would be different.

The Reception

Within thirty minutes of sending the email one of the guys came by my cube.  He wanted to express just how sorry he was, and that he would never do that again.  Going a step further he said that he would try and keep any of the other local smoker community from going up there.  He said that he just honestly had never thought about it, didn’t think it was any different than smoking in the designated area.  I really didn’t want to make him feel bad, but I also wanted him to realize that his actions had a much larger reach than he probably realized.  For me it comes down to being able to breathe or not.

I feel like the smokers as a whole are pretty put upon, and I don’t want to demand that they stop smoking.  It is a personal choice, but it is also a choice that happens to have a pretty severe effect on my well being.  I went back and forth as to whether or not to blog about this but I thought it might be worthwhile.  Sometimes when you stand up for yourself it can have positive results, and even when it doesn’t at least it clears the air.  Over the last few days walking in, there would be quite a bit of frustration building as I saw people smoking in that closed in space that I had to walk in through.  If nothing else, venting that frustration would have been worth it.  In this situation however it seems like it will also make a positive change to the my environment.