In all that has been said and written about the Jayson Blair affair, one tiny detail caught my eye. It was the passing reference, in an account of Blair's escapades, to the fact that Blair, as a young New York Times reporter, and Gerald Boyd, then the paper's managing editor, frequently took cigarette breaks together.
Of course, much has been made of the fact that Blair and Boyd are both African Americans. I won't add to the speculation on that connection here. But I would observe that smokers now constitute one of the most fascinating and largely ignored social groups in America -- transcending all rules of race, class, gender or position. They have become a sort of persecuted minority, with many of the feelings of commonality that such a status can bring.
Any smoker is socially allowed to talk to any other smoker at any time, to ask for a cigarette or a light. The most successful opening line in the known universe -- male or female -- is "Can I bum a cigarette?" It's non-threatening, instantly personal and highly sympathetic. All smokers know what it's like to crave a cigarette and be without one, and so they are always willing to help, always empathetic and egalitarian. No other social phenomenon is quite like it.
With the spreading restrictions on smoking in offices, restaurants and other public spaces, smokers are being pushed into ever smaller fringe spaces, making their community all the more tightly united. They sympathize with one another as members of what they perceive to be a shunned group. To one another, in the safety of their reserved zones, they are struggling, suffering heroes and comrades.
In office politics, smoking can be a great aid to connection-making -- almost worth the toxins to some. Smokers typically go on common breaks several times a day to the same space. If you are a lowly intern and the head of your company is a smoker, chances are you suddenly have the chance to build a friendship based on common hardship, which can be a strong and instant bond.
In my experience, in workplaces where the boss is a smoker, smokers get three or four times as many breaks as nonsmoking employees while building invaluable career contacts. You can't buy those kinds of connections.
For what it's worth, I'm not a smoker and never have been, but in high school I worked at a large store where the owner and most of the managers were heavy smokers. They would be out on the loading dock every other hour for 20 minutes catching up on work issues and employee gossip. I used to grab glue sticks from the craft department and go out back with everyone else and chew on the sticks because they looked like cigarettes. I did it as a joke. Fortunately the boss thought it was funny.
In any event, I was promoted faster than anyone else in the store. I got my pick of jobs each shift and filled in for salaried managers when they were busy with other things. I wrote my own schedule. And I know better than to think it was just because of my qualifications; those were essential, but so was having four breaks a shift during which I rubbed shoulders and swapped stories with the senior staff.
Clearly there was much more to Jayson Blair's behavior and his meteoric rise at the New York Times than whom he smoked with. But it is a rule of life that everything is about connections, about whom you know. In business, people always favor a known over an unknown. Even as we crack down on smoking, document its ill effects and successfully sue tobacco companies, there's still room for members of a somewhat marginalized minority to smoke their way to the top.
The tragedy is that smoking is so harmful, because the instant community it fosters is something many of us wish we could be a part of.
The writer is a graduate student in the science writing program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
