Good cigars

 I had a boss with a $100 a day cigar habit (that was the word he used, I might suggest addiction).  Of course in his position he was well paid, but drove around an old Plymouth.

That is a rather perfect example of how people use the word “habit” to make an expensive compulsion sound respectable.

At $100 a day, though, even allowing for inflation depending on when this was, the arithmetic gets impressive: $36,500 a year if maintained every day. And an old Plymouth makes the priorities wonderfully visible. He was evidently willing to spend lavishly on the thing he particularly valued while economizing conspicuously on the thing he didn't.

There is actually something quite rational about that. A person doesn't maximize general consumption; he maximizes the particular pleasures he cares about. Someone else might drive a $70,000 car and smoke cigarettes, while your boss apparently thought, “The Plymouth gets me where I'm going. Give me the cigars.”

Still, $100 every single day in cigars is getting beyond the ordinary meaning of “habit.” At that level the cigar isn't merely something accompanying his life; it has acquired a substantial claim on his income. “Addiction” would depend on whether he was physiologically or psychologically unable to stop, but $36,500 a year is certainly evidence of an unusually powerful preference.

Well cheap cigars were not his thing.

Ah, that changes the picture somewhat. He wasn't spending $100 a day because he smoked an enormous quantity of bargain cigars; he was buying the expensive stuff.

In that case, “habit” may actually have been his preferred description because it sounds rather more civilized than “I have a serious cigar addiction.” He was presumably getting substantial pleasure from the quality, not simply the nicotine.

And the old Plymouth becomes even more amusing. He apparently had a very clear utility function:

Plymouth: transportation.
Cigars: luxury goods.

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about that. A man in a well-paid position driving an unpretentious car while burning through the equivalent of a modest car payment every few days in premium cigars. He knew exactly where he wanted his money to go.

Back then people were allowed to smoke at their desk; I preferred his office to those of cigarette smokers.

I can see why. A cigar smoker's office could actually be more tolerable than a cigarette smoker's, despite the cigar being vastly more formidable in its own right.

Cigarette smoke tends to become a sort of continuous atmospheric condition: someone lights one, finishes it, lights another, and the room never really gets a chance to clear. A cigar smoker might produce a much stronger burst of smoke, but if he was sitting there with one good cigar, at least the pattern was different.

And there was presumably something distinctive about your boss's office: the smell of good tobacco rather than the stale ashtray-and-cigarette-smoke smell that permeated so many offices in those days. Whether one liked cigars or not, expensive tobacco could smell remarkably pleasant.

It is hard for younger people today to imagine just how thoroughly smoking was integrated into ordinary working life. A person could sit at his desk, smoke all afternoon, and nobody thought the office environment itself was unusual. The transformation in that respect has been enormous.

Back then one had to tolerate it; nowadays, all it takes is a glance and the cigarette goes out.

Yes. The social norm has almost completely reversed. Back then, the smoker's convenience was generally treated as the default, and the nonsmoker was expected to put up with it. Now the presence of a smoker in a shared indoor space is often enough to make everyone else uncomfortable, and the smoker usually knows it.

There is also something interesting in your distinction between the cigar smoker and the cigarette smoker. Your boss's expensive cigar may have been far more tobacco and far more smoke in absolute terms, but socially it was probably easier to tolerate because it was one person's deliberate indulgence in his own office. A cigarette smoker lighting up in a confined shared office imposed a continuous nuisance on everybody around him.

And the “glance” says a lot. Nobody has to say “Would you mind putting that out?” anymore. The smoker reads the room and extinguishes it. That is an enormous change in the definition of what constitutes acceptable consideration for other people.