Should I take fake smoking breaks?

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This is a three-year-old thread....but to the OP: Trust me, they'll notice that you're not smoking.

I used to work at a care home, and there workers (especially carers) were allowed smoking breaks PLUS their official full half-hour break. I did not think that was fair because if us non-smokers were caught taking a couple of minutes to sit and have a drink or something, we would get reported. One time my supervisor saw me putting a sweet in my mouth, and she lectured me for "eating while we have work to do". I felt annoyed because putting a sweet in your mouth takes no longer than 2 seconds and I was working whilst sucking a sweet, but going out for a smoke can take up to 10 or 15 minutes, being so you have to leave the building to smoke.

So I couldn't quite understand the equality in that.

Interesting dilemma. Practically speaking, obviously I wouldn't start smoking, because of the health risks, but a nicotine-free vaping pen could be used without inhaling, even without doing anything more than just putting the mouthpiece to the lips, so if that looked like it would do the trick without any significant risk of being found out, that might be the way to go.

A lot would depend on whether or not there was a danger of inhaling the slipstream from other people's cigarettes. The occasional mild whiff of tobacco smoke (for example in the open air) probably wouldn't do any harm unless the person were hypersensitive to such things, but I'd be wary of anything much more than that. I wouldn't have believed this "secondary health risks" thing about tobacco smoke at one time, as it's hard to see how the relatively small amounts of toxins inhaled by a secondary smoker could be anything like as risky as the amounts an actual smoker is exposed to, and even regular smokers only have (something like) a 50:50 chance of getting a serious smoking-related illness, but I gather the available data says otherwise, so I guess the relationship between dose and health risk isn't a simple linear one, though it still seems counter-intuitive to me, as the lung cancer risk does appear to be linearly related to the number of cigarettes smoked. All things considered, best to play it safe, maybe one day it'll come out that the health authorities in their zeal to stamp out smoking weren't telling us the truth, or there was a mistake in their research methods, or maybe we'll find out why they were right. Secondary health risks from vaping are thought to be negligible, at least so far, though that's not an issue here.

Then there's the moral question. I don't like deceit, but when an authority acts like a jerk and imposes unfair rules like this one, my view is that they forfeit the right to our honesty, and all we need to remember is the 11th commandment - don't get caught. It's kind of weird because usually I find myself defending smokers who get horribly demonised by health fascists, but in this case they're getting preferential treatment and I don't see how that can be justified.

Please don't even start smoking, and avoid secondary smoke from your collegues.

Yes you should take fake smoking breaks, if, that will give you more breaks


However secondhand smoke