Like many others, my first job after high school was in fast food, and like many others, a lot of my coworkers were smokers. I was not.
The place I worked at was a franchise. The franchise owner’s daughter and son-in-law often “worked” with us so they could justify not hiring as many people as we really needed. Still, they never did much actual work beyond trying to micro-manage and/or get out of paying us however they could, mostly by being very annoying about breaks.
For example, we only got one fifteen-minute break once per shift, and they decided at one point they were no longer going to pay us for that fifteen minute break… until I showed them the state law saying breaks shorter than thirty minutes must be paid and told them that if I wasn’t being paid, I’d be taking thirty minutes every shift and advising my coworkers to do the same.
They opted to keep paying us for our fifteen-minute breaks. They didn’t like me very much after that, but I worked as close to full-time hours as they allowed, never called out, and they weren’t willing to risk me filing for unemployment, so they never fired me.
But they were also smokers, so they had absolutely no problem whatsoever with people taking smoke breaks basically whenever they wanted.
Luckily, the person who actually had the manager title was fairer, so she made sure people only went to smoke one at a time and never during a rush. But still, it just didn’t sit right with me that the smokers got to take extra five- or ten-minute breaks multiple times per shift and the few of us who didn’t smoke only got our one official fifteen-minute break.
At the time, e-cigarettes and vapes were brand new, not yet used at all in my very rural small town, and not widely advertised yet. So when I bought one, none of my coworkers (or the owner’s family) had any idea that this little cigarette-shaped device I started waving in the air when I took my turn for a smoke break actually tasted like vanilla and had absolutely no nicotine in it at all.
I think my manager might have suspected, because she poked her head out once and reminded me that if I was taking a smoke break, I had to actually be smoking, then gave me what an author might describe as a knowing smirk when I sucked on my little glowing stick. But she never said anything else, so I don’t know if she actually knew or if she just thought my over-the-top adoption of the habit was funny, could go either way.
Since I was now also benefiting from the lax smoke break rules, they changed almost immediately. The attempt to say “no smoke breaks at all” was very poorly received (I think at least one person threatened to quit) so it was instead changed to only two smoke breaks per shift, no longer than five minutes each.
I continued taking advantage of those smoke breaks until I quit, enjoying the chance to sit down almost as much as the glares from the owner’s family, and once I left I never used that little e-cigarette again.
So the moral of the story: vapes with no nicotine in them still exist. If you can’t beat ’em, “join” ’em.
