I'm so amazed and inspired by those of you in this community who are retired and have smoked for a really long time. I often think "If someone who smoked for 40 years can do it, so can I!" That being said, I was wondering if anyone else here is still working full-time and having to cope with work stress, and if so, how they handle it.
I think my job is somewhat more stressful than average. I handle ten clients for a small company; for some of these clients, the point people I work with are awesome, but for others, the point people are stupid, rude, lazy, or otherwise problematic. Case in point, I had to proof and format a long document for a client at the last minute on Friday, and the point person kept e-mailing me ALL WEEKEND insisting that the PDF version of the document had "different fonts" than the Word version. Which is impossible because I made the PDF directly from the Word version. But she is a computer-illiterate idiot who makes three times as much money as me to do nothing, so she didn't realize that she was looking at the PDF at a different zoom level than the Word doc and that's why the fonts looked different. She e-mailed me eight times over the weekend getting increasingly pissed off as she kept insisting I had screwed up. She didn't understand that I couldn't fix the problem because the problem was nonexistent. She even had the gall to copy my boss on one of the e-mails, presumably so he could see how incompetent I was being and punish me. I wanted to throw a brick through a wall.
Smoking has gotten me through SO MANY of those situations over the years and now I am finding I have to create new ways to handle them. A few that have been successful for me so far are putting on some soothing music, taking deep breaths, reading for a few minutes and then coming back, and, when all else fails, writing the incredibly nasty response e-mail I am dying to send and then deleting it, just to get the frustration out of my system. Still, at nine days quit I find that more than anything else -- drinking, having a rich meal, whatever -- work stress makes me think about smoking. And, in fact, the last time I quit what broke it wasn't a night out with smoking friends or something like that; it was work stress. Anybody have any awesome secret coping techniques to share? Or do I just have to get used to dealing with this stuff without the help of cigarettes?
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. I see you found your voice on your blog - it's well written and will be cool to read back in time as you continue to learn your triggers and begin to grow!! It's soooo exciting :) 
