I had heard about e-cigs a year or so ago, just vague comments through a second-hand conversation that someone's friend's sister or some-such had bought one somewhere at a mall I think and was trying to smoke it... and that's it - the end of my previous information about e-cigs. I never gave it a second thought until my Dad called and said he ordered them for both of us. I have to admit I was pretty excited about an alternative to my tobacco cigarettes given it was the dead of winter and as my own rule don't smoke in my house. The smoking section at work is a painted line 40 feet from the entrance door in a concrete courtyard with no wind break where we "the dying breed of SMOKERS" are on display before a wall of glass windows in what feels like the "Morons" exhibit at the zoo. The only "warm place" to fuel my habit in relative comfort is in my car but when it's six degrees outside and the window is down to let the smoke out, the comfort goes out the window with it.
Nuff said about that, I'm sure you get the picture and if you are a true, dedicated smoker, you share my woe. So I was excited about an option or alternative that I had never really considered and decided to do some research on my own. Dad didn't tell me what brand or type he had ordered and I didn't know what to ask him about it so I just started googling around on-line. I found this link to the electronic cigarette reviews and started there http://www.electroniccigarettereviewsite.net/ . I was so excited about this info I emailed the link to my Dad and asked him what brand he bought us. A few hours later I received a deflated email from Dad that he had ordered the item with the worst possible rating on the review site and he was soooo disappointed. What he had ordered didn't even have nicotine in the cartridge. I explained about the research I was doing and he cancelled our e-cig order.
This review site led to many other interesting sites and I found it very informative to read the actual customer reviews as well as visit the individual e-cig company websites. Then I just googled and found videos of people smoking e-cigs, all different brands. I watched hours of videos of people smoking. Pretty weird - I know - but I did learn some stuff and I definitely did not want to have a bad e-cig experience because I knew if it didn't go well, I would dismiss the whole idea. I'm just hard-headed that way.
Here is some of the really basic stuff I learned:
-tobacco cigs are referred to as "analog"
-there are a lot of e-cigs on the market and some of them involve "dripping" liquid nicotine into a refillable cartridge - this is not for me
-smoking an e-cig is called "vaping" because you are inhaling water "vapor" if you like to "vape", you are a "vaper"
-the kind that you have to refill yourself is usually a three-part system and they can leak
-there are two-part systems out there - simpler is better for me - and they don't leak
-i found a lot of comments within these reviews that started or ended with, "this was my fourth type of e-cig", or second or third - i wanted to avoid getting the wrong thing
-the customer service ratings for a lot of e-cig companies are fair to poor in many cases - customer service and technical assistance is critical for me
-not all cartridges contain nicotine AND in some cases like with the two-part systems you can order different levels of nicotine and even different flavors like Espresso !!!!
Armed with these tid bits of information I continued my wandering around the web in a kind of obsessed daze trying to temper my excitement thinking this could be too good to be true, just a gimmick, just a fad, until I found this one !
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