Thursday 29 May 2008

Quitting can be hell

I just discovered something even more annoying than smokers. And that's smokers who've quit. As if devoting unfeasibly large periods of time to polluting the atmosphere, turning yellow, and stinking like a Bolivian garbage can wasn’t annoying enough, they then quit. Now before you all start waving your keyboards around in the air and baying for my hypocritical blood, allow me, gentle reader (emphasis on the ‘gentle’ in a life preservation kind of way), to explain.

Upon quitting smoking the average smoker will immediately go through some kind of metamorphosis whereby they no longer consider themselves to be the unhealthy sucker of Beelzebub’s tar that they once were. Oh no. They’ve quit now, which, if you give them so much as the slightest chance to explain, is akin to growing wings, ascending to the heavens, and giving the late J.C a run for his money when it comes to saintliness! Did I miss another meeting? The worst thing is though, once you’ve been suckered into this conversational purgatory, you’ll be engulfed with tales of new and interesting things they’re sticking to themselves, what strange and indescribable things they’re sucking on instead (stop laughing at the back!), and just how much money they’re saving by doing so! Which, interestingly, seems to bear little or no relation to your own values for ‘money never wasted on years killing yourself in the first place’. Strange that.

And then you get the jewel of their new found crown. You ask that one final, inevitable, question...

“So, how long’s it been since your last one then?”

“About a day and a half.”

That’s not quitting smoking! That’s just not going to the fucking shop!