No ifs, ands, or butts!

According to the Peanuts gang, happiness is a warm puppy. Well, I'm not part of the gang and anyway, my building doesn't allow puppies (warm or otherwise), so let's bag the cute intro and get to the point. Tonite's post is courtesy of my neighbors who are pissing me off.

Frustration is....

Neighbors who continue to smoke in the hallway/stairwell instead of their own apartments.

Any smokers who are about to get their knickers in a twist over this, let me just say...do what you want with your knickers. My beef ain't with you. (Unless you're my neighbor, in which case I say, "STFU.")

No, my problem stems from the fact that their smoke comes into my tiny apartment and hangs in the air. Am I paying (insert $ amount of choice) in rent so I can hack and be uncomfortable in my home? Apparently so. And before you go all, "Well, why don'tcha talk to your neighbs and/or management 'bout it?" let me just say, those roads have been traveled, my friend. And wearily so. As a matter of fact, when I first approached Tonya the M. about it, she didn't believe me. Fortunately for me, as I was stating my case, another neighbor came down to the office and complained about the same thing. She lives way down the hall—or she did before she wisely moved out—and mentioned that she has severe asthma and had to go to the emergency room because of the heaps of smoke. I never doubted her sincerity, and she did look rather ill, come to think of it. I was glad to have an ally. I probably should've gotten her name.

Anyhoo. Management's response was first to ask who we thought the culprits were. Then signs saying "No Smoking" were put up. And flyers with lengthy "please don't smoke in the common areas of the building for such and such reasons" were shoved under doors. And I guess if any of that crap had had a long-lasting effect, I wouldn't be here bitching about it right now.

But then, if I hadn't started bitching, I wouldn't have been moved to search the Net for nifty cartoony cigarette graphics, and I wouldn't have stumbled across pictures of Fred 'n' Barney smoking, and I wouldn't have learned that at the very end of early Flintstone cartoons, they'd show Fred and Wilma lighting up, and I wouldn't have started the longest run-on sentence on Flapjam to date. So there you go.

I guess the only question that remains is...why the hell aren't people smoking in their own fucking apartments?

<sup>Copyrighted images snagged from Cartoon Research, Paramount; Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh; and TVParty.com's Video Vault, respectively.

Note: Scroll down on the Fred & Wilma linked page to play the media file.</sup>