That's men for you: Every now and then I spot him: the Greater Crested Executive with his paunch and his pink shirt and his tie and his barrel chest.
He is walking up and down outside his office taking in the air and looking up at the blue sky. He appears to be a man who had a lot on his mind back at his desk - but out here the mental if not the physical weight has lifted. He has that "this is my moment of freedom" look on his face.
He is out for a cigarette break, of course. It is a pity that his moment of freedom involves engaging in a life-threatening activity.
What is even more of a pity is my suspicion that if he ever gives up the cigarettes he will also give up the moments of freedom that punctuate the working day.
Instead he will remain chained to the desk and the phone and his laptop just as his non-smoking colleagues are right now.
After all, have you ever seen non-smokers popping out of the office to take the air three or four times a day? It is an odd thing that Mr Mighty, your boss,will graciously accept that you need to "slip out for a fag" several times during your working day - but if you asked to go out for "a breath of fresh air" he would be puzzled and quite possibly upset.
What the smokers have discovered, thanks to Micheál Martin (to whom I am sure they are grateful) is that there can be such a thing in the working day as a time when you can be yourself again.
During that time you can get away from being wired up to an array of electronic gadgets. You can get your head out of the dramas and worries of office life and you can look at the clouds and the sky and the trees.
These breaks are of the most enormous value for your mental health. They keep your stress levels low and your head clear.
It's pretty obvious stuff isn't it? And yet unless we are under the thumb of an addiction that needs to be satisfied we are likely to deny ourselves what might be called these stress breaks because we have too much to do.
Of course if we were smokers we would not have too much to do because we would see to it that we made the time to go out to get our fix. What that means is that we do actually have time to take breaks during the day, whatever we say to the contrary.
Of course you could always just sit at your desk resenting that chap marching up and down there in his pink shirt smoking a cigarette and smelling the roses.
Not that he can actually smell them, but you know what I mean.
As he de-stresses, you could increase your blood pressure by muttering to yourself about the extra work you have to do because he is not actually in here doing his work.
Of course it is all nonsense because his smoking breaks probably do not actually bring any extra work your way at all.
How much better it would be if you went down and joined him, though at a safe distance so that you would not have to breathe in his smoke.
Then you could both return to your desks in a relaxed state and you yourself could enjoy a little smug superiority as the one who had not damaged his health during the previous 10 minutes.
The same, I suggest, should apply to the pub scene.
Why shouldn't non-smokers be entitled to go out to the pub door and chat up strange women just as smokers can?
But what are these breaks to be called? To introduce a new type of break - such as "health breaks" - could trigger years of industrial relations negotiations.
I suggest you take the line of least resistance. Just announce that you're "off for a smoke break" and nobody will bat an eyelid.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.