It's still winter here (mostly below zero), and I live in one of those buildings that has several individual apartments and just two 'main' entrances. It's safe to say that no one would want to open their windows any longer than 5 minutes (if they even thought about opening them). So smoking, in these months, becomes a very edgy subject in apartments where one of the two (or three) residents doesn't smoke. Even otherwise, I would imagine smokers themselves wouldn't want the stench to be absorbed by their clothes.
Whatever the case is, at any given time you'll find at least 4 to 5 people -- mostly men -- smoking right outside the 'main' door. And because of the continuous feed of the carcinogenic gas, the whole area -- the small room between the two doors, the mail box area, the lift area etc., -- reeks so much that one could almost faint (well, at least I feel like it). I wasn't going to ask them to stop smoking because they were well within their "rights". Besides, I don't exactly look like Shaquille O'Neal. So I just thought about it as I got into the elevator, "they have two choices: one is to smoke in their own apartments and give migraine to their room-mates, or put all the residents through a 'mild' headache for one or two minutes. hmmm, the guys outside must be socialists".
Of course, the third choice, if you have to mention, is to quit smoking altogether. But we don't want to go there, do we?
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