Like a pediatrician rounding on cystic fibrosis children in the hospital and smoking at their bedside. That's what the early 1980s were like.

I was born in the early 90s and remember making fun of the idea that a non-smoking section separated from active smokers in the IHOP by a thin barrier that didn't even reach the ceiling could do anything.

Boy, leaded gasoline really fucked up whole generations, didn't it? Oh... We are still dealing with the fallout from that, aren't we?

Omigod.

We had to do this with our first house. Former tenants were 2 pack a day each with kids in The house. The water cascaded down completely brown.

My wife's parents used to smoke heavily. She tells me how they had to clean the windows monthly just to be able to see out of them

Gross, even in my chain-smoking days I never smoked indoors.

Ashtrays everywhere. Companies marketing for kids who proudly make massive branded ashtrays, like McDonalds.

Even just going to a restaurant or bar got so much more enjoyable.

Cigarette lighter? You mean the finger print eraser and "lesson enforcer"? It was always empty when I grew up, seems like every child needed to learn that it was still hot even after the glow had vanished :)

The bic type lighter where everywhere, including in the coin shelf in cars

I thought the cigarette lighter in the car was a rubber stamp and I'd get the icon marked on my hand.

Yes, I burned myself.

Like, even teachers smoked. Not in lessons, but if they were out in the playground supervising, or in the staff room, they'd light up.

My headteacher had a pipe. I think it was about the only thing that kept him going, right up until the cancer got him.

Part of the reason kids have asthma from that era, myself included, is because our mothers smoked while pregnant.

disappeared when everything went non-smoking in the 90’s.

Funny, in Russia that transition happened around late 00s.

A-and in 2014 entrance to my (then) uni territory still looked like one big stinking cloud of smoke and a barely visible group of students smoking just outside, some coming, some leaving.

Someday when beverages are a thing of the past, people will be aghast that cars ever advertised their drink holders.

Yes, someday we will all ingest nothing but crumbly dry blocks of nutrient fuel, and scoff at those who used to slurp up liquids like a meat mosquito.

The flip side is that now that cars have zero ashtrays, most smokers just throw the butts out the window.

I remember this!

I have a 2015 car. Imagine my surprise to find that it has front and rear ashtrays. I hadn't seen an ashtray in a car since probably the early nineties. I remember for a while after the ashtrays stopped being standard that you could order a "smoker's package" to get them, but I thought that option had long since gone away.

I have a Trabant, a car from East Germany that was made pretty much as cheap as possible. Still has ash trays front and back.

When I was a kid I used to kick cigarette butts down the aisles at the local grocery store.

I’m a weirdo and I loved the smell, so naturally I became a smoker at the ripe old age of like, 10.

I know how much other people hate the smell so I’m always so paranoid about it.

I’m about to be a stay at home dad for a bit. I’m quitting to kill the expense. Wish me luck!

...my high school phased out the student smoking area starting my freshman year in 1986: the older classes still had access, but not mine, and by 1990 it was fully decommissioned into a landscaped atrium...

...when i worked as an apartment groundskeeper in the early nineties, my first two hours of every day were spent cleaning cigarette butts throughout the complex...

I also made one. But mainly out of choice. My parents didn't even smoke. I guess I was weird that way.

I went on a road trip a few years ago and we went to a bar... somewhere along the mid Atlantic. Maybe Virginia or one of the Carolinas, and people are smoking at the bar, and I felt like I had just landed on a different planet. Like... I had almost forgotten people still smoked at all, let alone a dozen people puffing away in a small barroom.

We got pretty drunk and had a good time though. But then when I took a shower in the morning, it was like all that smoke residue was oozing out of my pores and hair. Being hungover and having a steamy, cigarette-smelling shower did not start the day off well.

Same. I'm so sensitive to smoke I will run away from anyone smoking in my vicinity even outdoors.

sometimes though, the bars smell like piss. i think id take cig smoke smell to piss smell

I came to Ireland when they just banned smoking and it was still legal in Germany. The first time I walked into a pub and ran against a solid wall of sweat and beer farts I missed smoking.

Seriously this! I grew up poor so going to restaurants was a 2-3 times a year thing. And as a kid, going to one meant non-smoking area, where the nasty ass smoke would still waffle over. And my eyes would get irritated, id get really sick and cough nonstop for days.

It didn't even notice the coincidence until it happened to me at a friend's house in college who was also a heavy smoker.

In the US, I lived in a state that went non-smoking and later a city in another state that did. B.O. mixed with mold and a hint of piss is what it ended up smelling like.

My pack has no vagine or anoose.

For real though, about to quit. Wish me luck, boys!

Aww man you’re gonna make me want to start again.

Drink smoking, fresh air smoking, adderall smoking, coffee smoking, drive smoking, fuck smoking.

I know one of those bars. When my city banned indoor smoking back in the mid-aughts, that bar still reeked of cigarettes for years. It was just coming out of the walls

I worked for an Internet startup in the mid '90s that was so desperate for venture capital funding we were sucking up to RJR Nabisco (who were rolling in so much cigarette money that they actually started a venture capital division just to do something with the cash). One day some of their executives showed up and they spent the entire day chain-smoking in our conference room (our building was a non-smoking building). The smoke was so thick everywhere you couldn't even see to the end of the hallway. I made a point of coughing loudly and my bosses sent me home before the end of the day. In the end we got nothing from them.

It's a warm memory because most of those bastards have probably died a miserable death by now.

Quite a lot. Most mothers smoked while pregnant and gave their kids asthma as a result, and ADHD too. That's why you see more of that.

Was in Tokyo and Osaka last year.

Tokyo was gorgeous. No smokers in sight at most locations. Some vapers, but whatever.

Osaka was the complete opposite. I had to find outdoor restaurants. The gaming bar I hung out had a smoking corner near the bathroom. Lots of cigarette butts all over the city.

Also:

• Any vacation spot with a lot of Russians, like Cuba. Nobody wants to tell a drunk Russian to put out their cigarette indoors, and smoking is allowed in open spaces (even covered spaces like open lobbies)
• Rome. Igneous rock is very porous, and everything ancient is made of it. Decades after smoking is banned there, the stonework will still be leaking the fumes out of its pores. The smoke was inescapable when I toured 15 years ago despite it being banned in indoor public places, and it will be inescapable 15 years from now.

So I literally just touched down on a flight from Tokyo (haven’t gotten off the plane yet) and actually not really. They’re more like America in the 00s. A ton of smokers and everywhere has to say you can’t smoke there, but you can’t smoke anywhere anymore. It’s definitely weird that they have to say no smoking on the Shinkansen, but it doesn’t smell like smoke

I watch Midnight Diner and they all smoke on there.

I live in Russia, it's better than 10 years ago. But this thread did give me memories.

I read a lot of Southeast Asian countries still smoke everywhere. And I can't imagine being cramped in a small area with a nasty ass smoker without flipping out.

I remember huge arguments about whether or not smoking was allowed during team meetings. Not in your office, that was presumed just fine.

The day they banned smoking in bars/restaurants was glorious. No more trying to decide if it was OK to wear something that required dry cleaning.

My wife is from an Eastern European country, and whenever we visit her folks I have a similar experience. Every single restaurant reeks of smoke, and there is apparently no political appetite to change that.

Apparently many states in Germany have smoking in pubs too . It's so nasty. Makes me actually ill to be around a smoker.

I had a family friend who smoked so much the walls oozed yellow. I could not bear to go over there even though I adored her.

What’s a buggy in this context, a cart?

People were smoking in the corner store I used to work in way past the day it became illegal, including the lady that owned it and the employees...

Ashtrays on carts, that's a new one to me who grew up in the very smoky 80s.

Smoking indoors is banned basically everywhere thankfully, but yeah, there are still way too many smokers here.

In France it's like a third of people, in Greece it's like every other man smokes.

I went to the UK and France in 2004. Got to go back to France last year; I was going to say it’s like the U.S. in the 1990s but it seems like they’ve banned indoor smoking in most buildings so it is better than that. There are still a lot more people smoking in outdoor sections than I’ve experienced in the U.S. for about 20 years, though. I’ve gotten so used to smoking being rare in the U.S. that it felt weird to see (relatively) so much in France.

The 90s were nothing compared to the 80s for smoking.

A lot of Japan as well, though the laws changed to ban it in some places prior to the olympics so (Tokyo, at least) isn't nearly as smokey as it was before corona and the olypmics.

Yeah, Japan still is like a giant ashtray last time I checked.

I am talking about where I grew up in Canada.

The 80s was another level of smoking. Smoking on planes, smoking in the nursing station while working, the doctor smoking while he rounded on a patient, smoking in movies, every restaurant, I didn't see anywhere people didn't smoke save for mostly in my school, but the teachers did have a smoking lounge.

I think you are even older than me!