For the smoker in a hurry…

It’s been hectic here. I have fallen asleep in my chair often over the past couple of weeks and there are rooms in the house that look like a crazed eBayer’s stockroom. It’s because that’s what they are.

The day shift week was a killer. Dayshift is incredibly tedious and now that it’s a seven-day week with no end in sight, I confess to having spent some of the day browsing job pages. I don’t want to let Boss down but I can’t keep this pace up much longer. Not with all the other stuff that’s going on. When it was just me, this kind of working was no problem. It’s not like I had anything else to do, other than go home, drink whisky and rant on the blog. It’s very different now. I have to get some stability in my life and really do have to have days off.

I’ll be back on evenings soon but even so, it’s too much. I’m at work as you read this. It’s on a timer.

One of the effects of all this was that I’d had to buy shop cigarettes. Shredding and tubing just took too much time. At £7 a pack, this soon started to affect my saving rate so it had to stop.

I used to get pots of tubing baccy in most of the shops around here but now they have the doors. They also have staff who don’t know what’s behind the doors and who have never heard of tubing baccy. Ask for it and wonder how old and dried out it’s getting behind those doors. Nobody knows what it is and nobody knows if it’s there or not.

The tubes are easy. You can sometimes get Gizeh Silver Tip tubes in Poundland at 200 for a pound. They contain no tobacco so don’t have to hide. What I needed was a source of tubing baccy – a good interim measure that would save the time of shredding (and cleaning the shredder afterwards, which is important) but which also leads to a lower cost than shop-bought ones.

I found a place online called Smoke King that covers everything I need. I decided to try their Bayside Virginia blend 100g tub and bought some Mascotte menthol tubes. I’ve used those tubes before but then they became hard to find, so I thought I’d have a quick blast of menthol again.

Vapers – that site also sells a range of e-liquids. Worth a look.

I placed the order at 00:13 am on the 14th and it arrived today, the 15th. That’s pretty damn quick. So I have a cigarette case filled for work tonight and no shop-bought ones.

These are a bit more expensive than I’m used to with shredding my own leaves. They work out about £3 for 20. Still a lot cheaper than the ‘cheap’ shop ones at £7 for 20 though.

Shredding time is now freed up for eBaying, and the drain on the savings is more than halved. Also, there are far fewer smoke breaks on evening shift because there is actually something to do.

If you’re a smoker with not enough time or energy for all the shredding, and trying not to spend too heavily in order to accrue some background cash, this is a good intermediate solution. Oh I’ll be back to shredding as soon as it all calms down here but for now, this saves me from the temptation of that easy option in the shops. Yes, just buying a pack is easy, but it dents the savings attempts far too heavily.

The Bayside tobacco is pretty good. It’s rough shredded though. The shredder I have makes a finer shred. This means it’ll take a few goes to get the tubing right but that’s just a minor inconvenience.

If you don’t want to spend time shredding leaves and you’re still smarting at shop prices, get to an online tobacconist and order tubing baccy, tubes and a machine. The simple tubing machines work well enough (I currently use a Bull Brand one from Poundland). I haven’t found the fancier machines to be all that much better, really.

Well, I have to go to work. Then try to convince a landlord that my random income is a safe bet for the rent and also get stuff ready to load up eBay again to keep that income random.

Maybe I should get a 9 to 5 job with a fixed salary and do it the easy way.

I’ll consider it…