In May.

One of the pieces of information I put on your drug test form is your birthdate. I'm not precisely sure why this little morsel is the least bit important to the drug testing process, but then again I suppose I've never thought about it or cared enough about it to ask. In any case, it stands to reason that the odds you (as a donor) share a birthday with me (the collector) would be roughly 1 in 365. That's a relatively common occurrence when you consider how many collections I conduct.

Trying to calculate the odds that any given donor is a lunatic is a mite trickier. I'm not sure how I would go about it, but it works out that one out of every three hundred sixty-five of these lunatics shares my birthday. I was lucky enough to meet just such a woman on Monday.

Ms. Orange, so named for the impossibly orange sweater she was wearing, was a nice enough lady, but she seemed a little off. She asked a lot of weird and irrelevant questions ("Do you think they drug test the animals at the zoo?") and offered up a lot of not-particularly-helpful information ("I only eat organic food and drive a hybrid car -- will that affect anything?"). About the time she started asking if the doctor at our office used "healing crystals" I realized that she would never shut up unless I simply interrupted her, and that's exactly what I did.

"Oh, sorry," apologized Ms. Orange. "Didn't mean to take up so much time. I can't be here that much longer anyway, I have to get to class. I teach flute."

And with that she vanished into the bathroom.

I was just finishing up her paperwork when she emerged with this curious observation: "You were born in May, weren't you? I can tell."

"Come again?"

"Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that. You just seem... impatient. Not rude or anything, just all-business, you know?"

A pretty fair assessment of my mood on any given day, I suppose. "I wasn't born in May."

"Are you sure?"

Are you kidding?

"Yeah, pretty sure."

"When were you born, if you don't mind my asking?"

Having just copied her birthdate onto the paperwork twenty seconds prior, I reply: "Same day as you."

Ms. Orange frowned. "I'm serious."

"It's true. Same birthday, except six years apart."

She looked offended, and impossibly sad, as though sharing a birthday with someone who was impatient and all-business were some terrible thing. She didn't say anything weird after that, just silently signed the form, collected her belongings and left.

I tried to piece together what had happened afterwards. I'm almost perfectly sure that the month someone is born in has no bearing whatsoever on their personality -- and what's more, I'd never even heard anyone make such a claim before. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Ms. Orange was into astrology, but then she would have identified me by a zodiac sign and not a month. I think.

Maybe she was just insulted that I pointed out she was six years older than me. Who knows.

In any case, if you're reading this, and you have a May birthday, let it be known that Ms. Orange (and probably everyone else who reads the same pseudo-astrology garbage she does) believes you are impatient and all-business by nature. That shouldn't irritate you, but if it does, just do what I do: picture Ms. Orange curled up in her beanbag chair inhaling a tub of organic ice cream because some kid pointed out that she's thirty years old. It certainly cheered me up.

According to my boss, we collect birthdates on the paperwork to serve as an identifier. I guess this is useful in case we spontaneously lose the donor's name, social security number, telephone number, employer information, and the sample's unique specimen ID number.

Never a good day.

I don't hate my job, not even in the least. It's a pretty sweet gig. I can't come to work and play six hours of PlayStation relatively uninterrupted anymore, but I still get to keep to myself and screw around on the internet most of the day. The vast majority of my responsibilities are stress-free, and even the most major and unthinkable screw-ups on my watch would only lead to re-doing fifteen minutes of work, worst case scenario.

But something dawned on me recently that I hadn't really thought about before, and it kind of weighs me down: I don't really have good days. It's entirely possible to have a bad day, which does happen once in a while, and is a mainstay at any job. Most of my days, naturally, are just regular days: clock in, do some combination of work and internet-slacking, clock out. But a good day? It's just not possible.

One of my first jobs was at an ice cream store. I used to love making the waffle cones. Two of my shifts every week consisted of me sitting at a row of waffle machines with two pans of cone batter on the counter in front of me and a CD player tucked into the pocket of my apron. Even on non-cone days there were little things that could occur to cheer me out of a sour mood, even something simple as a customer dropping five bucks in the tip jar after getting exactly what he wanted out of his ice cream experience. Maybe it was silly, but very good.

After high school I put a few months in as a sales rep for the Home Shopping Network. This consisted mostly of selling fake Susan Somers jewelery to women with twelve maxed Master Cards, but once in a while you'd get someone who has been looking for some rare coin or just the right size basketball jersey, and you could tell that just by completing a sale for them you'd made their day. I'm sure people working in pretty much any sales position experience this from time to time. I distinctly remember one time we were selling some kind of telescope as part of an after-Christmas sale, and a man called up asking if we still had any. He had tried to buy his son that very telescope for Christmas, but couldn't find one anywhere. Just the fact that this man would be able to share the galaxy with his son after all, and that I had played some roll in facilitating that dream, really made my night.

You might not think I could have a good day at my old pee clinic, and you'd be partially right. Nobody wants to take a drug test. At worse people verbally abuse you, try a thousand different ways to cheat, or eat up hours of your time because they can't muster enough urine to fill a 30ml cup. At best they come in, drop their sample, then leave indifferently. Even so, there were little unexpected niceties that would happen from time to time. Sometimes I'd walk up to the drug store and they'd have Vanilla Pepsi stocked instead of just regular Pepsi. Sometimes a friend would drop by for a few hours to play Street Fighter or watch a movie with me. Sometimes I would get a shipment of supplies exactly at the moment I needed them, completely unexpectedly. And sometimes I would just use the downtime to pursue one of my hobbies in a particularly exhilarating way. There were good days.

Nothing like that ever happens where I am now. On my best days I get my work done and go home. On the worst everything piles up and I get trapped in some monotonous office politics or chewed out by some client who can't figure out how our online ordering system works. Most days fall somewhere in-between.

I wonder if I'm bound to come across some positive surprises eventually, but in the meantime it just feels like I'm going through the motions. It's been a long time since my girlfriend asked me how my day was, and I was able to answer her with anything other than "Meh."

I'm trying to think of ways I can turn this around. Maybe I'm just in a slump and just need to stop crying about it.

Peemeistering is a thankless profession. Next time you're subjected to a drug test, don't forget to tell your collector how much you appreciate him handling your bodily waste.