Here is my story...
I smoked a pack+ a day of Camel Filter and Camel 99s for 30 years. At 29 years I also tried the cigarette styled ecigs (cigalikes). I used them for about 3 months, and still smoked regular cigarettes as well. I was never close to being satisfied and finally gave up entirely.
About 9 months later I was going on a vacation where smoking cigarettes would often be prohibited or too inconvenient. My wife and I decided to get some ecigs to use when we couldn't smoke. Based on my previous experience we decided to go all out and get a large variable voltage mod with some large tanks. Never cared for the flavor of the liquids we got, but they produced enough vapor and delivered enough nicotine to do the job, and do it well. We both still smoked, but they worked well enough that after the vacation was over we continued to use them and cut our smoking to less than half of what it had been.
After that we tried other flavors. My wife quickly found that she loved straight menthol and once that was found her smoking dropped off until after a month or so she simply stopped smoking. For me it took a while longer. I had that mindset that I wanted to replicate smoking so I kept buying "tobacco" flavored liquids and continued to smoke on the side. Eventually I moved away from the tobacco flavors entirely and into candies and mints. Once I found that I liked mints, peppermint in particular, then I also gradually stopped smoking.
There was never a conscious decision to stop smoking for me. I never had that intent. I was looking for a supplement to use when I couldn't smoke, that was all. But once I had the setup that produced enough vapor to keep me happy and a flavor I enjoyed more than tobacco, I found that I simply preferred the ecig. I never hit a point where I said "This is my last cigarette". Quite the opposite, I was finding that I would light a cigarette and only smoke a quarter of it before I put it out and started puffing on my ecig instead. I walked around for 2 months with a half pack of cigarettes in my pocket "just in case I want one".
Switching is easy once you find the right setup. I HIGHLY recommend going into at least 2 different ecig shops and asking to try a couple of their different mods and try a wide variety of flavors before buying anything. Try more than one device, try the more expensive devices as well as the cheap ones, and try all of the flavors with an open mind. Get some first hand experience with the options before making a decision. DO NOT just buy whatever the first shop you walk into recommends.
In fact, I would suggest that once you find what you think you want, before you buy it come here first and ask if it's a good setup. You'll get lots of members who have used whatever you're looking at that can tell you just about everything good and bad about it. This forum is packed full of ex smokers who would love nothing more than to help someone else get off the stinkies, and have been through the journey of disappointment before finding the right setup.
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- unless of course your friends would bequeath one to me 
