Day 65

Hi Folks

If you forget about the sneaky cig I had on day 27 it's now gone 50 days since I smoked. If you take it from day 27 then it's still fast approaching 40 days without a cig. Gone are the days when I spent every minute wrestling with the demons in my head. Nowadays it can be up to eight hours before I think about smoking. It does still hit me at some point most days but I can cope with that.

How's it going for Kath and Poet? They are just starting out at this and I wish them all the luck in the world. We've also been visited by Peets who quit on day 9 of Champix and, reading between the lines, is possibly still considering whether he might just manage a sneaky one. If you are thinking about a sneaky one or worrying that you'll never stop missing smoking then it's probably time to use the link to Allen Carrs book at the side of the page. I know, when Kelly sent it I slagged him off a wee bit, but he does have some stuff that might get your head where it needs to be when it comes to staying stopped. I actually do know someone who quit using his method alone.

This is also a big week for the blog. Why? Well despite having almost no online presence, despite the fact that even people who know about the site can't find it unless they type the exact terms, the counter at the bottom of this page says that we're going to have 100 hits any moment now. I'm chuffed with that. Unlike most people I don't have an online life. I'm not a technophobe, quite the opposite, but, and I'm maybe showing how unhip I am when I say this, I'm not on Bebo, Twitter, my space etc. The last time I even thought about doing something like that was friends reunited. I got put off a bit by all the spam they sent me and have avoided it ever since. To this day they still send me emails.

So this is my online life and 100 individual ISPs have found this site. Ok between work , home and the laptop three of those ISPs are mine. Two probably originate from the wife and the same again from my mum. But it's still a lot of folk discovering a diary about smoking (or not smoking as the case may be). It would be nice to get an update on how everyone is getting on. We started with Jamie T, then Kerry B, then the mysterious Jo with the time difference. Thanks to Jo we gained Kelly and Allison. Then Kerry Homes joined and most recently Poet, Kath and Peets. If all of us do well then we've cost the tobacco industry thousands already. Scary thought.

I'm not going to get too excited by all this discovery though as I posted a question on training zone on Friday night and it had been read almost 70 times by Saturday night. Now that is online presence.

This week!!! well I've got my head down working on some stuff that my parent company in Europe (where smoking is often mandatory but somehow safer) want my UK employers to implement. It's a great lesson in cultures. In the parent company when they introduce a change they just introduce it. They get their workers together, a few hundred at a time, and tell them what's changing and the workers just go with it. When they ask us in the UK to do the same, we create a project, appoint a team to work on it full time, and report daily on why it's the wrong thing to do. Where I work there is a drugs and alcohol policy with random testing. At our European HQ the vending machines have measures of wine amongst the options. You cant see the 'no smoking' signs in their pubs for smoke. We get arrested for ignoring them in our pubs. It makes us seem more up tight and yet, when you deal with them, it seems that us Brits stress them out more than they do us.

Why am I telling you this? Because I'm having to get all creative and clever about training material to impress them. Traditionally that should involve a marked increase in smoking on my part. But not this time. So what will be the effect???

Stay hooked to find out.