RECORD STORE TALES #1195: No Smoking? No Second Date!

Disclaimer:  I have never held it against anyone, be it a friend or girlfriend, who smoked.  Very rarely, I expressed my distaste for the habit, which was met with angry rebuttals, but I never practised any kind of discrimination based on smoking.  I even allowed smoking in my car.  We’ll get there, and you’ll understand why when we do.

Working at the Beat Goes On, lots of the employees smoked.  The breaks were frequent, but I let it slide.  It did bite one of my employees, Matty K, in the ass one day.

Matt’s parents were British, and his mum had the most lovely accent.  She called for him one day while he was out having a cigarette.

“I’ll go get him, he’s just outside having a smoke,” I informed her.  She thanked me, and I went outside to hand Matt the phone.

After he completed his call with his mother, he told me that she didn’t know he smoked.  Until now.

Hah.  That’s still funny.  I don’t know what happened at home after that, but I can say that it was I that outed him to his mother.

Truth be told, I can’t remember who smoked and who didn’t, but it seemed like all of them smoked with the exception of a few.  OK…I admit to one thing.  I was always jealous that they got to go outside for a break, a seemingly pleasurable experience, and I didn’t.  I felt like pretending to take up the habit just to get breaks when I wanted them, but knew I couldn’t fake it.

T-Rev was a smoker, and I lived with him for six months.  I couldn’t have hated smoking that much.  I lived in a smoking house.  I did have to clean out his ashtrays myself.

In 2000, the Kitchener-Waterloo region banned indoor smoking, in a test project that would be adopted province-wide in 2006.  I thought it was a great idea, though some of my co-workers sure didn’t.  Bingo halls and bars saw a temporary decline in sales, but the bounce happened quickly.  Now it’s so natural to see people smoking outside, we don’t even think of it anymore.  In 2000, however, it was new and unique to my region.

And, for some reason, I couldn’t seem to find a local girlfriend.  They were all long distance.  As an added bonus, most of them didn’t drive.  However, I did have one date with a girl from Toronto who drove.  I was working at our Cambridge store at that point in the story, which was T-Rev’s store.  Meanwhile, T-Rev was in Ajax building a new store.  With hindsight it was a pretty messed up way to run your staff.  You had a perfectly good store manager in T-Rev, who was familiar with the layout and the clientele, but they shipped him off to a town two hours away to work with his hands.  Trevor was made all kinds of promises about how he wouldn’t be working behind a counter anymore, and he’d be building 10 new locations a year.  Yet they hedged their bets, and didn’t hire a new manager for his store.  Instead they had me manage two at once.  I was exhausted, but this girl from Toronto was willing to meet me after work and go out for dinner.  She drove!  How could I say no to that?

I remember being a little freaked out, that for all I knew, she could be a dude, but I decided that I was just being paranoid.

She was not a dude.  She was taller than me, with black hair in a short bob.  She was definitely out of my league.  She had a black leather jacket.  It was spring, and it was still warm outside.  We met up in the parking lot of an East Side Mario’s nearby.  We did the customary hug and headed to the restaurant.

She turned to me and asked, “Can we get a table in the smoking section?”

“No such thing!” I told her.  “Indoor smoking is banned here.”

“WHAT.”  I’ll never forget that.  Just a totally flat, unimpressed WHAT.

To make up for the lack of indoor smoking, I joined her outside when we wanted a cigarette.

It didn’t help.  There was no second date.  And I blame the no smoking, despite being out of my element.

Of course, we all know the happy ending to the story.  I married a smoker, but Jen eventually quit in 2008.  Her dad was very proud of her.  She hasn’t had one since.

I’ll tell you a secret that I’ve never shared with anyone before.  My parents do not know.  This is new information for the world.

When we were dating, I got sick and tired of the frequency of her smoke breaks.  I remember putting her through Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and she smoked every 15 minutes, I kid you not.  Every 15 minutes.

Driving to the lake, she wasn’t so bad.  She could go 30 minutes.  We stretched it to 45, but eventually I got so sick and tired of having to stop for smoke breaks, that I just let her smoke in my car.  My new car.  My new leased car.

Sorry dad.