Much drama.

Office politics. Oh boy.

The number one reason I dislike sharing my office with a dozen other people is the politicking and gossping that goes around. Whenever something goes wrong, it's always someone else's fault. If work isn't getting done, it's always someone else's job. Everyone seems to have honed the skill of shrugging responsibility onto someone else's shoulders until it's become a fine, perfected art.

Anyone who digs back through the Peemeister archives for a bit will find that back when I had my own office I would sometimes have trouble procuring supplies. This was because, as a satellite office, my bosses would literally forget I existed and sometimes get behind schedule ordering things for me. This is perfectly understandable; it was my responsiblity to let them know what I needed, and theirs to get it for me. When I ran out of something it didn't matter which of us had screwed up, just so long as we got the problem cleared up. We always did.

Supplies at this office are a bit trickier. Since not everyone has access to or knowledge of all the supplies, no one person knows the entire inventory of the office. Which is fine; what do the people up front care how many boxes of forms I have? And why should I care how many seringes the doctor has for giving shots? That isn't our respective department.

So yesterday I'm doing a pile of drug tests when I notice we're almost out of paper towels, paper cups for the water machine and hand soap. I decided to restock everything before continuing with the collections, but didn't know where the various materials were kept. Still being an office newb I turned to the girls up front for help.

"I don't know," she said, "nobody in this office ever does inventory. We've been out all week."

She proceeded to examine every cupboard and closet in the office to drive her point home, muttering all the while about how nobody ever bothers to order supplies. Eventually she turned up one brick of paper towels, but nothing in the way of cups or soap. She blamed one of the other girls for not being stocked.

I put the towels into the dispenser and decided that getting supplies was no big deal. It's such an easy job, I figured, and if nobody's doing it I could handle it myself to prevent running out in the future. I ran the idea by my boss: I'd print out a checklist of all the supplies needed in the drug testing area and, once a week, I'd do inventory and pass along a supply order if need be. It occured to me that it was a bit strange that the girls up front would constantly complain about not having supplies instead of, you know, ordering some, but I wasn't asked for my opinion. My boss liked the idea and said I should run it by the girl whose job it is to order our office supplies.

I finished up my collections and, when finished, dropped by the supply girl's office to let her know what we needed. "Oh, here you go," she said, and handed me a full jug of hand soap and two full sleeves of paper cups.

"Wait, you mean we had this stuff all along?"

"Yeah, why, are we out up there?"

"The up-front girls said you never ordered any."

"Well, it's all back here, all they have to do is come and get it."

Then she went on her way.

Suddenly I felt very, very silly about offering to increase my workload by doing office inventory; someone was already doing it, and doing a very good job of it. In actuality, all that had happened was a couple of lazy people would rather go without supplies and complain to everyone in sight than to take a few minutes and walk to the back and ask about it.

I suppose the argument could be made that it's supply-girl's job to make sure all the supplies end up where they need to be, but I'm not really sure it is. She works hard and has a lot of other stuff to worry about without having to run up front every few hours to make sure the soap dispenser is full. Since she never actually uses the soap dispenser herself, it is far more logical for the people who do use it (myself included) to pass word along to her when it's running low. Which is exactly what I do.

I'm thinking a lot these days about office efficiency and what I can do to increase it. I'm not really sure I can do much of anything, with co-workers around who literally don't make the minimum effort necessary to do their jobs successfully. It's sad because I know their slacking off is affecting the rest of the office both in morale (nobody wants to hear their whining) and in productivity (whenever they get too "busy" one of the backup collectors has to stop what they're doing to go up and do drug tests until they're bailed out).

I try to stay out of the drama as much as possible. It really doesn't interest me in the slightest. But sometimes one has no choice but get involved since others are so intent on smacking everyone over the head with it.

The word "busy" is in scare quotes for a reason. I've been called up to do drug tests so the up-front girls can sit around and chitchat about Gilmore Girls.

Not fake, just clueless.

I pull the next donor's paperwork out of the slot and check the ID it's attached to.

Robert Alvarez
Painter
1234 Address Rd
Tampa FL

It's a driver's license from 1995, torn practically to shreds. Instead of getting a new license issued, or even just renewing it through the mail or online, Mr. Alvarez has printed little stickers with his name, occupation and updated address to stick right on his license.

Around the edges of the sticker I can see the dirty, gluey residue of stickers which have been replaced. For some reason, this completely unacceptable ID has passed inspection at the front desk.

I call Mr. Alvarez up and explain why I can't accept his ID. I need to be able to see the original name printed on it. He does, at least, look like the picture on the driver's license.

(Long, boring aside: in Florida, and many other states too I assmue, you can renew your driver's license through the mail. The way this works now is they send you a new license with the picture they have of you have on file, which sometimes leads to situations where the person will hand you an ID with a picture that is ten years out of date. Even more ludicrous, they used to not send a new card at all, but just a sticker to put on the back. That leads to situations where not only is the picture out of date, but the expiration date on the card is ancient. They stopped issuing licenses like that back in the mid- to late-90s, but some people still have licenses from earlier than that. Mr. Alvarez was just such a case. His license wasn't expired, just very old and obviously tampered with.)

I explain to Mr. Alvarez that if he wants me to accept the license, he has to allow me to peel the sticker off and examine the name underneath.

"Oh, yeah man, no problem. I have a whole stack of them at home, so don't worry about it."

I peel the sticker off and verify that this is, in fact, Mr. Alvarez's license. Oh goodie.

Fortunately, he doesn't take offense to what amounts to an accusation on my part. In fact, he seems delighted that I pointed it out. He explains that he moves around a lot, so every time he gets a new address he has to print new stickers. He says this is easier than dealing with the DMV every few months. He explains that he goes through this every time his ID is needed for something, so he's used to it.

Everyone knows a guy who will say things like, "Hey, I've got a great idea for a bumper sticker!" and then proceed to describe an excruciatingly lame pun which, in his own head, is the most fabulous comedy mankind has ever envisioned. You feel bad for that guy. He's simply not as clever as he would like to believe, and has absolutely no idea. Mr. Alvarez is that guy. He is very, very proud of his little ID stickers, and the grin on his face while he was explaining their history and function was simply remarkable.

While I'm working through Mr. Alvarez's paperwork, I calmly explain that it is not a good idea to tamper with his driver's license in any way, even if his intentions were good. He brushes me off saying "It's not a big deal."

I would love to meet the cop on duty that pulls Mr. Alvarez over for a broken tail light one day. "This guy, he covered up parts of his ID with sticky labels and I had to peel them away. Then he tried to explain why he was so brilliant and what a great idea it was. I didn't even realize I was beating the stupid out of him with my nightstick until about twenty minutes later when my partner got back with the coffee and pulled me off."

Names in this post have been changed to protect the clueless.

A little privacy, please?

The layout of our office is simply genius. And by "genius", of coure, I mean blatantly idiotic.

Previously, my drug test area was a semi-isolated area outside of the bathroom. I could stand in the hallway and see the bathroom, the drug test area, and out into my main lobby. I could ensure nobody was going to sneak back into the drug test area and violate the donor's right to privacy. Since there were no other employees other than myself and keeping donors corralled was as easy as barking, "Please wait a moment, sir, I'll be right with you," this was never an issue for me.

If you scroll down a few entries you can see how even the tiniest infraction, imaginary or otherwise, can blow a collection wide open and cause huge problems for everyone involved. I don't think we need to go over that territory again.

The drug test area in the office I now work in is actually a hallway in between the medical area and the staff break room. The two bathrooms still branch off of the hallway, but now the drug test area (that is, the place I stand and do all my paperwork, and where the urine sample is actually handled and stored) is the hallway itself, in between the two bathrooms.

Apparently, some months back, a donor complained that several office employees walked through the drug test area to the break room while his sample was being secured. The solution: my boss put up a privacy curtain. You go back to do a drug test, you pull the curtain closed behind you.

The problem? The curtain may as well not be there.

Outside of myself, my bosses, and a couple of the other employees who don't do drug tests anyway, everyone ignores the curtain.

Need to heat up your coffee? No problem, just open the curtain and sneak through. Lunchtime and you absolutely positively cannot wait another four minutes to dig into your leftovers? Just pretend the curtain isn't there. Pretend the drug test victim in question doesn't have a right to privacy at all.

You can see the look on their faces, too. They look confused. Some look annoyed. Most don't mention it, but a few do. "Should she really be back here?" they'll whisper to me underneath the hum of the microwave or the din of the faucet.

Part of it, I know, is that we are just desensitized to pee. Really, it's not the unbelievably disgusting thing that society tells us it is. Remove all the taboos and the all-encompassing "ick" factor and it's just a slightly smelly yellow liquid. We get that, of course, but the donors don't. They're embarrassed enough as it is that one person has to bottle their pee, let alone a parade of other employees nonchalantly traipsing through.

In simplist terms: the average donor wants as few people to look at their bodily waste as possible. This is a totally understandable feeling.

So this puts me in an awkward position. I know how important it is that a collection be done correctly. Remember, I was on the front lines for three years. I would not define drug testing at office as "the front lines." If there's a problem here, or the donor pitches a fit, you can go and get a supervisor. Someone with authority can put him in his place. There's a wall between the collector and the donor here. By the time I see donors, their paperwork is already done. Their ID is already checked. Any complications that could lead to the collection not taking place has already been handled.

In other words, collectors here are just a cog in the machine, not the machine itself. I think that causes complacency among the other collectors. "Oh, well, if there's a problem, someone else can handle it." I, on the other hand, learned to be self-sufficient. "Well, if there's a problem, I'd better know how to handle it because there's nobody else here to do it."

Which is why I'm such a rules nazi: the best way to clear up protential problems is not to cause them in the first place.

That brings me back to the privacy curtain. When people skulk around while I'm trying to do a collection, that is a problem for me. If, like, Becky runs through the curtain to heat up her mac and cheese and the donor I'm working with comes back positive, I'm the one who will catch the fallout, not Becky.

So now I'm kind of a curtain whistleblower. My bosses back me up on it, of course, but I can tell the other employees are sick of it. No fewer than three people (and maybe more) have gone to the bosses with complaints like "Ricky yelled at me today." That doesn't reflect well on me, even though I'm technically right and even though this is a matter where being right is actually important.

Each and every time someone parts the privacy curtain and sneaks through, thinking it isn't a big deal, they are jeapordizing someone's drug test and they are jeapordizing my job. I hate that, and I wish I knew what to do to make it stop once and for all.

There isn't really anyone in my office named Becky, nor is Becky meant to personify any of my co-workers. I just chose that name because everyone, at one point in their lives, has had an absolutely insufferable co-worker named Becky.