Dirty Kuching Smokers Infesting The Spring Mall

"Forcing smoke down my lungs is pulmonary rape. It invades my body against my will, and it's not fair."

Patty Young

I went to The Spring earlier this month in pursuit of a haircut. One of the saloons there had more customers than they could stomach while the other wanted to charge me sixty bucks for a simple wash and trim because it was 4th day of the Lunar New Year and that, for some reason meant that they could rob their patrons blind. I ultimately decided to just have dinner and then leave to go barber-hunting elsewhere. Kenny Roger Roasters was serving some weird teriyaki version of their usual chicken so I decided to try it (turned out to be a bad idea). In the restaurant, I was seated right by the window, and this was what I saw,

She's surrounded!

I had a good view of the mall's back entrance and there I saw a little girl trying her darnedest to feed the automated parking machine money while a lime-shirted cigarette addict smoked merrily beside her. At the same time, another bloke wearing a striped shirt - also smoking - approached the little girl from behind. These reprehensible men were forcing their dangerous fumes on her and on every child, baby, senior citizen and pregnant mothers who use the entrance. What you don't see in the photograph is their conscience.

I watched as the bespectacled striped-shirt man walked right up to the little girl till the lit end of his cigarette was hovering right above her head,

Thanks for killing me, daddy.

As it appears, he seemed to be the little girl's father and had wanted to help her pay the machine, and in the process, breathed secondhand cigarette smoke right into her eager face below. I mentioned in a previous post that this is a depressingly common sight in the Kuching: a lot of parents here don't love their kids enough to keep away from them when they indulge in their tobacco habits. I have been to many cities in Malaysia and so far, the people of Kuching appears to me to be some of the most ignorant and least considerate folks in the country. This is a region where I cannot escape from cigarette smoke even after climbing to the summit of a 800-metre mountain!

When lime shirt was done with his ciggie, he casually threw it onto the ground even though there was a trash can situated just a few fucking steps away from where he stood. He didn't even bother putting it out! It's a fire hazard, you Ass Oh Bee!

You'll notice that the ash remained unscattered, meaning that it was still burning right where it laid.

Now, the management have reserved a few parking spots adjacent to the back entrance for the use of mothers with infants, pregnant women, the handicapped and senior citizens. And since The Spring's entrances are where most of the smokers congregate, these people using the special parking spots are regularly exposed to the poisonous fog that these smokers maintained there - and they are the people most vulnerable to cigarette smoke!

To prove that I am not lying, here is a picture of a man smoking right beside the special parking spots I mentioned, all set to force his cancer-giving smoke onto preggos and babies,

He is also an employee of one of the shops in the mall to boot.

Is The Spring's management doing anything to curb smokers (especially from the staff of their tenants) from lighting up on the premises? Not a single lifted finger! They purport to run a place that caters to families but would do nothing to protect them. My wife, back when she was still pregnant with Darwin, actually went to their office to complain about the smokers but they said that they can't do anything so long as the smokers smoke outside (while still remaining on the premises) - which is a fat smelly load of cow-butts because they own the fucking place and could definitely enforce house rules against cigarette smoking on their property if it pleases them! They choose not to, that makes them complicit in jeopardising the health of Kuching's children.

I mean, look at this,

The red-collared MBO Cinema employee was also smoking.

Pictured above are employees of various businesses within The Spring, and three of them were smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, another little girl was standing nearby with her mother waiting for their ride to swing by. Just look, the Spring's management allows this to happen to poor defenceless kids!

The main entrance and foyer of The Spring have an equally bad (perhaps worse) infestation of these nicotine junkies,

Not pictured: human decency.

In the picture above, you can see the guy in blue sucking on a cigarette while two unsuspecting families with toddlers and children stood just a few feet away.

And a few feet away, right outside of Starbucks, two men - one wearing a grey shirt and one orange - were smoking as well when a little girl walked past holding her father's hand.  And if you are observant, you'd notice that the seated man who was partially concealed by the father's upper body just exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke as well, The girl didn't stand a chance.

I couldn't get a good angle and capture the orange shirt's fag in this shot, but you can see grey shirt's in his left hand if you enlarge the picture.

These are not a collection of pictures taken over an extended period of time. All of them were taken within a span of just 30 minutes.

The walkway outside of KFC and the special needs parking in the basement are also congregation spots for The Spring workers and mallgoers to light up.

We continuously bemoan the epidemic of underage smokers in our country but the fact is, these kids pick up smoking because their parents smoke, everyone around them smokes, and businesses encourage people to smoke by their tacit approval. Something drastic and urgent needs to be done before our entire nation goes up in smokes.

Anti-nicotinist,

k0k s3n w4i