England’s smoking ban on July 1st has caused a sea change in British social interaction, but not in an obvious way. A percentage of the ten-plus million smokers in Britain [statistic from Action on Smoking], have been using their outside smoking time to catch up on their correspondence. According to Orange UK [via T3] people were multitasking by sending text messages while smoking. Naturally, sending messages to bitch about how they were cast from of their now smoke free hangouts to commune with the elements and other frustrated smokers.

Without divulging the actual percentage, the network saw a 7.5 million increase in texts within the two weeks of the ban. Given, this is the summer time, I wonder if this will make the cost of messages to go up or down, or if this will just be a seasonal phenomenon. Perhaps Orange, O2, 3, and T-Mobile will be smart and make TXTs cheaper in the winter months. Regardless of what happens, my hopes lay in the notion that England will start up the use of the cigarette holder to make smexting easier.