No cigarette butts about it

Midnight, New Year's Eve 1997. Confetti flew, noisemakers sounded, bar patrons hoisted their glasses. The bartenders hoisted the ashtrays.

Despite the fact that I had to spend yet another New Year's Eve on the wrong side of the bar, the holiday had a special highlight that year.

As revelers celebrated inside, the staff celebrated outside - by smashing every last ashtray from the bar.

While the final stroke of 1997 brought in the new year, it also brought in the final implementation of the ban on smoking in restaurants and bars throughout California.

As I watched the last ashtray shatter, I did not realize we were celebrating an incomplete victory.

While the new law would prevent cigarette and cigar smoking, it would do nothing to staunch the flow of smokers' complaints.

It would do nothing to prevent the whining and moaning - followed up with another healthy dose of complaints, just in case we bartenders did not hear them the first time. In the two bars I have worked at, post-ban, the smokers have been a distinct minority.

However, what the smoking crowd lacks in number, it makes up for in volume.

This is not to imply that every smoker is continually badgering bartenders and cocktail servers.

It is the few, the proud and the loud smokers who feel the need to blame the bar staff that I am referring to.

The theatrics I have seen could win awards. Bar guest, unlit cigarette in hand, flings hand over heart, whining "What do you meeeaaan I have to go outside?"

"I mean you have to go outside," I reiterate.

While being required to smoke outdoors may be a distinct inconvenience to smokers, being exposed to secondhand smoke for an estimated 20-40 hours a week is a distinct health risk to the staff.

Bar employees are regularly exposed to 20 times more smoke than someone who lives with a smoker, and suffer from more lung and heart disease than those in any other occupation, according to the California Medical Association.

Think about that.

The CMA lists secondhand smoke as the nation's third-leading preventable cause of death. Key word: preventable.

I, for one, am glad California has cracked down on preventing this health risk in my workplace. (I am also glad to be finished with digging soggy cigarette butts out the sink and going home with smoke-scented hair.)

So the next time a patron feels the need to vent to the bartender about his or her state's prohibitionist rules against smoking, remember, we are just trying to do our jobs And we want to stay healthy while doing them.

Oh, I exaggerated about smashing every last ashtray. We did save a few - and we will be happy to hand one to you on your way outside.

Jeanine Cardullo is a journalism major at CSULB.