Ask Wednesday: What did Susan's column last week remind James T. Carney of?

Cigarette smoke was the only scent that bothered me

By James T. Carney

I thought that Susan’s suggestion to Angie that she have humorous signs alerting visitors to her office that she was allergic to perfumes made a lot of sense. The basic approach of appealing to people as opposed to ordering them is a more effective approach (despite the fact that having spent my career in US Steel, which was an organization to the right of the Prussian army, I had my own view of getting people moving).
    Fortunately, I am not sensitive to anything but cigarette smoke, which meant I really suffered in my early days at USS until conditions turned around. By 1989, when I moved to the Pension Fund, no one smoked, so I did not mind the decorative ash trays on my desk.
    About six months after I assumed my exalted position, someone came down to see me (G. Spencer by name) and smoked. As soon as he left (with great tact I had refrained from telling him to put the butt out), I summoned my ever-faithful secretary to get rid of the ashtrays.
    Now, of course, I could have thrown the ashtrays out myself. But back then, I considered such a menial action beneath my exalted status. Besides, I knew that Gladys would tell everyone, and that would have some beneficial results.
    From my own business standpoint, I did not mind people smoking at their desk as long as they did not take breaks. It was no different from drinking coffee. And, if second-hand smoke did the other employees in sooner than otherwise, I figured the Pension Fund was realizing an actuarial gain. Remember, the chief duties of my exalted position were

1. pray daily for the return of the black death,
2. check the obituary columns in the Pittsburgh papers, and
3. advocate for real national health insurance (instead of the monstrosity that our government has produced.)

    Actually, this smoking thing was one of the causes of my downfall at USS. I was less than enthused with the creation of a smoking room in our offices because we did not have breaks, and letting smokers go off to the smoking room was setting a bad precedent.
    When a Pittsburgh city ordinance outlawed smoking in the building, I told the high command that it was faced with a crisis. If we let smokers go out of the building, which meant going down a set of elevators to get outside, we would be giving them in effect a 20-minute break twice a day, and the other employees would demand the same. No one in the high command had the guts to do what I was advocating – no breaks for smokers or for anyone else – and production suffered accordingly.

Susan's (and Jonathan Price's) dad

Copyright © 2014 by James T. Carney