Tuesday
Mar192013
More evidence of smoking rooms in Brussels
Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 18:08 
Still in Brussels where I am staying for a second night.
I've been in meetings all day (report to follow) but here are two office smoking rooms, both completely legal.
Not bad, are they?
Reader Comments (2)
It's nice to see they are kept clean. Gian Turci recounted an experience of a filthy smoking room at a Canadian airport back in the 1990s. When he asked the cleaner in the corridor if the room was ever cleaned he was told that by order of the management it wasn't.
The cleaner said he he had been told by management that the room must be left so : "That smokers are made to see the filth they create."
It always was about denomalisation and not customer service as other passengers were entitled to but we didn't know it then.
The same policy as Pat describes was implemented in the smoking room of the local hospital when I was a patient and, in its way, is even worse, presenting a health hazard in what should be a spotlessly clean building (or at least it would have done had general standards of hygiene not, even then, have deteriorated to hazardous levels).
I wouldn't have been surprised to find that the patients in the smoking room recovered more quickly than those who couldn't enjoy the small but very important pleasure of a trip to the room, and the shared act of smoking encouraged conversation between the patients. Such small things, I'm sure, really play a part in keeping spirits up and aiding recovery.
Recently someone told me in all seriousness of a guy who was so stressed in hospital from not being allowed a smoke that he had a heart attack and died.