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Oh, Crap

July 30th, 2007

Big chink in the apartment armor: our neighbors on both sides smoke. Furthermore, they like smoking on the veranda (one mentioned something about the building being no-smoking, so maybe they have no choice but to smoke outside). We noticed this a few times before from the neighbors on the south side, but the neighbors on the other side just came in today–and twice in one hour I got a huge dose of cigarette smoke in my living room.

The problem: we keep our balcony doors/windows open quite often to ventilate and to cool the place down. If someone smokes out there, their smoke is drawn directly into our place via the wind, and suddenly it’s as if a smoker has entered the room. Worse, closing the doors and windows won’t help–it’ll just trap the smoke inside, which means that we have to experience the whole cigarette or series of cigarettes.

I am semi-allergic to cigarette smoke. I don’t know if it’s an actual medical condition or just a psychosomatic quirk, but the results are the same: when I am in the presence of cigarette smoke, my throat gets sore, I get nauseous, I get headaches, and generally feel like crap. Keep it up and I am prone to catch colds.

Which means that if our neighbors smoke on their balconies and we can’t do anything about it, I am royally screwed here. I will have to have Sachi find out more; I tried talking to the smoking neighbor as politely as I could, and she was polite back, but she used vocabulary I could not figure out. We’ll also have to talk to the administrative office downstairs.

I sure as hell hope that we can figure something out….

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  1. K. Engels
    July 31st, 2007 at 02:12 | #1

    I am semi-allergic to cigarette smoke. I don’t know if it’s an actual medical condition or just a psychosomatic quirk, but the results are the same: when I am in the presence of cigarette smoke, my throat gets sore, I get nauseous, I get headaches, and generally feel like crap. Keep it up and I am prone to catch colds.

    I wish you luck in finding a solution. I have similar reactions to cigarette smoke and the last time I had to ask someone to stop smoking because I was feeling nauseous, I got the whole “you’re faking, you don’t do this every times a car drives by, do you?” argument. Because car exhaust and cigarette smoke obviously have the exact same composition!?

  2. Luis
    July 31st, 2007 at 02:26 | #2

    Oh, don’t get me started. But many smokers seem to have a particular bug up their arses about this. Some of it comes, they claim, from having been continuously abused by non-smokers, but that does not explain why they stomp all over me when I speak to them with as much politeness as I can muster (and if you know me, I can be very polite when I want to). Mostly, I believe, it comes from having a severe addiction and being asked many times over not to indulge in it when they really, really want to. But don’t even think of bringing that up, even if politeness fails.

    The forceful and often angry obstinacy of smokers is something that many non-smokers have come to fear (which, I would suppose, is the point of being forcefully obstinate). You have to figure that someone who decides to light up around a lot of other people already has decided “to hell with manners or consideration” and could well be closer towards “f*ck anyone who objects.” In many situations, I have asked people not to smoke (in an office, on a crowded bus), and been harshly rebuked and verbally abused, despite excessive politeness on my part. But what gets me is that the other non-smokers almost always fail to pitch in to stigmatize the offender. If it’s a situation like an office, the others tend to see me alone and give “private” support, but refuse to get involved.

    For good reason, too–despite your experience, and mine, of smokers complaining about how bad non-smokers can be in such situations, I have come to believe that it is smokers who, by far, tend to go to extremes of impudent vulgarity and downright nastiness when their cherished addiction is even frowned upon.

    This tends to be a minority of smokers, of course–but a much larger minority than that of non-smokers who verbally abuse smokers.

    As for sensical arguments, don’t expect any. I have heard many arguments from smokers over the years, and none hold any water. I have heard the “pollution” argument before as well–the argument being that I live in a city with huge amounts of smog, so how can I protest secondhand smoke? The answer being, of course, that we choose our poisons; smokers, I am sure, would not accept the “pollution” argument if you started regularly spraying the air with something that they despise the smell of, or filled their workspaces with diesel exhaust at slightly-less-than-toxic levels.

    Again, it’s the addiction talking. I had a group of people I knew, all literate, all otherwise intelligent–and all smokers–throw at me studies done by the tobacco industry, saying that secondhand smoke was perfectly safe–as if such studies were impartial and fair. Had I give the same kind of evidence on any other topic, like oil companies saying that global warming was a myth, they would have laughed me out of the room. But they accepted the tobacco industry “studies” without blinking.

    See? I told you not to get me started. And this is me being restrained.

  3. ykw
    July 31st, 2007 at 03:13 | #3

    If the wind is blowing toward your apt, then I think it will push the smoke to the left and right of you. If the wind is coming from the left or right, I think the wind blows the smoke past your apt window, and if there is lower pressure in the apt itself, will enter the apt. If the wind is blowing away from your apt, then I think the area of your porch can become a low pressure zone where the are is not moving much, yet if the apt pressure is lower than the porch, the air will enter. Opening the door that leads to the hall a crack would change the pressure in the apt either up or down, depending on the pressure in the hall. It would be interesting to have a device with 2 sensors that measure pressure difference between porch and inside. A big fan from hall to apt would help. Yet I’m not sure how much of a fan you would need to put positive pressure into the apt relative to porch. I guess that would depend on outside wind direction and velocity.

    p.s. I’m sensitive to smoke as well.

  4. Luis
    July 31st, 2007 at 10:15 | #4

    Well, it looks like I’m screwed. We just had another infusion of smoke, at 9 am… and it seems to have come from the balcony of the apartment below us. This time it had an aroma of ashtray added in, which probably means they smoked inside and then opened the windows and let it all out, or something.

    I guess that the only thing I can hope for is that they won’t be doing this 24/7, and then deal with it the best I can. But it is definitely a huge down point. I lived in a complex in Inagi before this, and only maybe six or seven times in seven years did I have this kind of problem–in other words, hardly ever. But then again, in Inagi, (1) the insect problem was such that I rarely had the windows open for long anyway, and (2) balconies were small and unpleasant enough so that few people ever hung out on them, to smoke or do anything else. Here it’s different. Unforeseen, but there’s not much I can do about it–maybe. I still haven’t checked with administration. But Sachi seems to think that it will be seen as a natural activity that can’t be much objected to.

    YKW: a fan almost certainly won’t help; the wind is forceful enough that you could not have two windows open at the same time, else the fan would be easily overpowered. You’d need one window open, and the hallway door open, and even then it’d take a really powerful fan to clear the air of the whole apartment–and that’s assuming that no one else has their door to the hallway cracked open, creating a reverse air flow. Thanks for the suggestion, but I don’t think that’d work.

    Not to mention that 80% of the problem is being hit unexpectedly with cigarette smoke at random times; having to scramble to place fans and stuff is not my idea of fun, either. I just have to hope that this doesn’t happen as often as I fear it will.

    We’ll just have to see how this develops.

  5. Paul
    July 31st, 2007 at 14:34 | #5

    Well, you could probably make the argument that if it’s a non-smoking building, even the balconies are off-limits.

    Somehow, I’m not sure that will fly. It probably wouldn’t go over well here, anyway.

    People seem to think they have a right to smoke, even if it’s outside. They don’t see the disconnect between them intentionally polluting a small volume of air and generalized pollution in city air that urban residents have to deal with.

    I’m lucky and unlucky in this regard. I get a bunch of smoke from the restaurant next door when the wind is just wrong… but I can just close the door to the balcony and then I’m free of it.

    Good luck with the battle.

  6. Anonymous
    August 5th, 2007 at 12:56 | #6

    Dont take this the wrong way, but Luis doesnt your scooter give up more exhaust pollution thru its pipe than a common cigarette?

    BTW- I hate cigarettes.

  7. Luis
    August 5th, 2007 at 13:07 | #7

    Perhaps, in strict terms of volume of noxious gassesm, but we’re talking about apples and oranges here. One is a by-product of transportation, a massive industry that few would argue is necessary in modern society, and the scooter is one of the less-polluting forms on the road. It’s also done in strict areas intended for such use, and the one scooter, by itself, does not add to the total local amount of such exhaust by any measurable amount.

    The cigarette smoke I refer to, on the other hand, is immediate to my proximity, streaming directly into my living place–and the odor is far, far more noxious than vehicle exhaust. We live right off a major avenue, and I don’t notice any exhaust smell, no more than anywhere else, to be honest. Cigarette fumes are instantly noticeable and recognizable, and cause a repellant reaction in far more people than does traffic exhaust. Not to mention that cigarett smoking is not a necessary endeavor, but, instead–let’s face it–a drug addiction.

    Now, if I brought my scooter up and started it on the balcony, and smoke exhaust streamed from my balcony to the neighbor’s place, they would be absolutely right to complain.

    On the other hand, if my neighbor smokes on the street level where I use my scooter, I will not at all complain–because by the time it reaches my apartment window, it is so diffuse that it is undetectable.

    So I really don’t see your point as being a strong analogy.

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