As smoking goes out of vogue and regulations become tighter, there are fewer and fewer places where the less health-conscious can get their nicotine fixes.
But before you smokers whine about nanny states and your right to stain your teeth with burnt tobacco as you please, keep in mind that at no point in history was smoking ever, ever allowed on the Hong Kong MTR.
Apparently one guy did not get the memo.
A video depicting a stubborn smoker completely unfazed by his fellow MTR passengers’ complaints has gone viral overnight.
The clip, which was posted to Facebook at about 5pm yesterday by Andy Lau (no, not that one), has been shared over 24,500 times and viewed more than 660,000 times.
In the accompanying caption, Lau explains that he at first approached the man very politely: “Sir, you cannot smoke here, please put out your cigarette.”
(None of this alleged conversation is recorded in the video, FYI.)
In a complete affront to his sensibilities, the smoker apparently did not reply with even an ounce of the courtesy Lau had showed him: “Who are you? What the hell does it have you to with you?”
Offended, the anti-smoking hero says: “It doesn’t matter who I am, you’re affecting other people, okay?”
The smoker, getting annoyed with this pestering vigilante, finally agreed to compromise: “Just let me finish the cigarette!”
Hero: “Are you really not going to put the cigarette out?!”
Smoker: “Yeah? Or what? I’m going to catch on fire?!”
Hero: “Sure, no problem, you wait right here.”
The hero then writes that he was about to grab a fire extinguisher and spray it in the smoker’s face, but a more even-tempered man stopped him, telling him to not bother, and that he’d just film the smoker instead.
In the clip, it also appears as though the person filming it used the emergency intercom to alert MTR staff to the atrocities being committed in his train compartment.
And so, our self-righteous defender of clean air implores the Hong Kong netizens to share the video far and wide so that we can all collectively shame the offender until he descends into a dark, smoky circle of hell.
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