Just plain rude.

Yes, I agree with you that the man stank. I reckon he stank worse than any human being I've ever smelled before in my life. I do admit that every moment I spent in this man's company I breathed through my mouth, a strategy which backfired once I discovered that the funk was so thick that I could actually taste it in the back of my throat.

I'll also grant you that he was, indeed, disgusting. Yes, I too saw the multiple layers of stains on the back of his shirt where it was sweated straight through. I saw the flecks of dandruff nestled snugly in his hair. In fact, my first impression of the man as I saw him snoring away in the corner of our lobby was of a homeless person who rolled up in here to escape the heat for a couple hours.

However, after I learned he was, in fact, a truck driver who had just driven straight through from Arizona only to find out his boss forgot to inform him about a drug test that he was now 32 hours late for, and how polite and cordial he was considering how infinitely pissed off he must have been, I decided that I would probably be just as smelly, dirty and tired as he was given the circumstances.

It's my opinion that you didn't wait long enough to be sure he was out of earshot before you resumed your conversation about how gross he was to whomever it was on the phone you were talking to.

And yes, I do think you overstepped the lines of professional courtesy when you followed him out of the office, three steps behind, spraying Lysol everywhere.

So that's why I was pissed at you today. Hope that clears things up.

P.S.: If you had time to chitchat on the telephone, why didn't you have time to just do the drug test? Rabble rabble.

The Super-translator.

I met a real live superhero last week, no foolin'. This guy's super power was to brag about his job as a translator.

I've worked with a lot of translators since I started peemeistering, for just about any language you could name (and probably a few you couldn't). Foreign language collections basically fall into one of two categories: Spanish and Everything Else.

Everything Else is actually the easier of the two. These are the people who have recently immigrated here but haven't picked up the language yet. They cart around professional translators (which, except for Super-translator, are awesome) or at the very least family members who know what the score is. These collections are usually pretty easy because they don't harbor any illusions of knowing English and are used to talking through a third party pretty much all the time.

Spanish is much trickier because, in this part of Florida, it's totally possible to live your entire life in Spanish without ever learning word one of English. There's almost always a Spanish-speaker present anywhere you could think to go (two in our office) so many of them learn to just fake their way through whatever transactions they can and get really angry at the ones they can't. What's worse, when they actually do bring a translator along it's usually just a friend or family member who either doesn't know any more English than they do, or for some reason doesn't think the transaction is important enough to translate in full.

Many have been the times when I've asked the "translator" to translate two lines of English text into Spanish for the benefit of the Spanish-only donor, only to have them say two or three words. I don't know a lot of Spanish myself, but I do know that firma aqui does not mean "I certify that I have provided my urine specimen to the collector..."

Thankfully, ever since I've been working in this office, I can hand the Spanish collections over to one of the Spanish-speaking up-front girls. I still deal with the translators when it's practical though, which brings us (finally) to Super-translator.

First off, the donor did not speak any English. She didn't speak "a little" English, or even "un poquito" English. She flat out did not understand the language. Going out on a limb here, this might be why she came in with a translator. Not only was Super-translator a translator, but he was, well, a super translator. He said so himself!

Now, the translation process is pretty simple: I say something in English, you repeat it in Spanish. That's it. I usually make it clear that the translator needs to repeat everything I say, even if it doesn't sound very important, because usually I'm talking to the donor's friend or co-worker who (as previously mentioned) doesn't think the whole thing is a big deal. But since Super-translator was a super translator I assumed he knew what the score was and didn't bother going through the whole "repeat after me" rigamarole. Imagine my surprise when I open up with an instruction and Super-translator stays silent.

Getting him to actually repeat anything I said was a battle. He reprimanded me because I was "supposed to direct my instructions to her, not to him", and claimed he wasn't translating word-for-word because he was also trying to help her learn English. His Spanish was broken and mangled at best. He either didn't know how (or refused) to say "Don't flush the toilet!" so he resorted to pantomime for that part.

By the time we go the poor donor into the bathroom she looked as confused as I've ever seen anyone in my entire life.

The entire time I was trying to fill out paperwork Super-translator kept trying to strike up conversation. Did I know how much money he made? Did I know that if I wanted to make real money all I had to do was learn another language? Did I know that people from the northern US talk different than people in the south and isn't that interesting? Did I know that I could learn to speak English better myself if I learned how to speak Spanish first? Did I know that Florida had a lot of Spanish-speaking citzens and wasn't it interesting how many there are?

Did I know it was such a shame that I only spoke one language?

Eventually we stumbled our way to the end of the collection, where the donor has to sign the part of the form saying it's actually her urine and so on. I can't let her sign it without being sure she knows what she's signing (this is one of those legal loopholes that can come back and bite me later). I made it clear that he would have to read the form to her in Spanish before I could let her sign it. He read it to her in English -- poorly, I might add! -- and looked at me for approval.

I've dealt with cheaters, liars, bastards and primadonas in this job, but I think this is the first time I actually wanted to reach forward and wring someone's neck.

I let the donor sign the form, but kept her boss's copy of it. As I waved them back out to the lobby Super-translator had the audacity to more or less tell me to congratulate him on a job well done. All he got out of me was a "Just have a seat in the lobby, please."

I left one of our own Spanish-speakers with instructions to please call the lady back up and read the form to her before they were allowed to leave. It must have been a slap in the face to see someone who isn't even a translator by trade do his job for him, and do it better than he ever could hope to do. Alas, I was busy with the next customer at that point and never got to see the self-righteous look on his face.

The entire time we were fumbling our way through this hapless collection, Super-translator was gently bopping his head along to whatever song was playing on his iPod. This was my first indicator that maybe he was going to do a terrible job. I should have followed my gut on this one.

Cue trombone sounds.

I've been handling supply orders in the office for the past month or so. The girl who did the job previously did alright with them, but she didn't have a system or anything resembling organizational skills. She would wait until someone ran out of something (letter openers, paper towels, whatever) then place an order for that particular item alone, plus however much copy paper would put the order over $100 so we qualified for free shipping. The end result was we usually had enough of everything to go around, but we'd run out of random things constantly. Except copy paper. We always had stacks and stacks of copy paper.

In any case, I whipped up a decent inventory system, moved all the office supplies out of the giant junk drawer and into a cabinet outside my office. I'm proud to report that we haven't run out of anything since I took over, largely because I actually take the time to do the inventory each week and place an order for things we're about to run out of. Everyone else has adjusted pretty well to this new system, and if I've done my part to make things around here run that much more efficiently, more the better.

Of course, I still have to have conversations like this one every few days:


"Do we have any more of those things?"

What things?

"Those things."

WHAT things?

"The things that go in the machine, up front."

What machine?

"The one that, where you slide, you know, MasterCards."

"The credit card machine."

"Yeah yeah."

You need receipt tape for the credit card machine.

"Yeah. Do you have them?"

They're in the supply cabinet, with all the other supplies.

"I can't find them."

They're on the top shelf. There's a huge pack of ten.

"They're not here. I'll go look up front."

No. They're in the cabinet, on the top shelf. There's a huge pack of them. Just reach up there.

"Which one?"

Top shelf.

"Yeah but where?"

TOP SHELF.

"We don't have them?"

Here. They're right here. Exactly where I said.

"Oh! Well that's too tall."

I'll move them to the middle shelf.

"Oh, we have highlighters! We needed some, I didn't know we had any."


I know, I know... my co-workers are dummies har har har. I wish it were that simple. This woman is not stupid. She knows where I keep the supplies. She knows she needs neither my permission nor my assistance to take whatever she wants. She simply prefers to be catered to, and if she can get away from her responsibilities up front by dragging the transaction out for three minutes, by golly, that's just what she'll do.

So, I figure I spend three minutes blogging about it, and the world keeps on spinnin'. Thank the Good Dude it's Friday.

This lady is shorter than I am, but not so short she can't reach the shelf her supplies are stored on. Even if she was, there's a footstool floating around back there with the specific purpose of enabling people to reach high-up shelves. Some people are just driven by an innate need to be difficult.

Son of a...

Not one full day after blogging about how nobody would want our "Osama says: buy more heroin!" poster for use in their office, I got an order for one.

Eagle-eyes readers might recall a time a few months ago where I wrote about a monumental screw-up on my part just a day after writing about a monumental screw-up that ended up costing some poor collector thousands of dollars.

The only logical thing to do, of course, is complain about how my boss will never give me a $5-an-hour raise or let me hook my Xbox up to the TV in our spare office.

Lots of updates this week. Wow.

No, it's an egg in a frying pan.

Peemeistering has been a little on the quiet side lately, so I thought I'd share one of my favorite aspects of my new-ish job back in the shipping room: the propaganda posters.

Everyone remembers the good ol' "this is your brain... on drugs" commercials. Egg, frying pan, yadda yadda. Good stuff. Later on they released a remastered edition with a skanky white lady who, instead of frying the egg, smashes it with the frying pan and proceeds to completely demolish her entire kitchen, thereby proving that you don't need to be on drugs to be a certifiable nutball. Well, one of the materials I'm responsible for shipping out to clients are tacky "drug-free workplace" posters that make the fried egg commercials look like masterpieces.

Some are inoffensive enough, like the ones that just have our company logo and phone number. Actually, flipping through our brochure, that's the only one. The rest are... well... let's just say they aren't oozing class.

Take, for example, our Taco Bell dog rip-off. It features a picture of the owner's dog saying "Yo no quiero drogas!" Never mind the fact that the Taco Bell dog hasn't even existed in like five years, and the fact that every person on the planet was completely annoyed with it even when it was relevant... is anyone really going to re-think their entire outlook on drug abuse because a Photoshopped dog head told them to -- in Spanish?

Speaking of Photoshopped heads, I really like the one where they just went in and collapsed the top of Mona Lisa's head to prove marijuana shrinks your brain. They forgot to paste a doobie hanging off her cryptic smiling lips, though.

Our most popular poster features a cartoon frog and the message "get a grip on life." I don't have any idea why people love the frog so much. Either he's related to the Geico saleslizard, or it has something to do with the fact that it looks a few shades less tacky than our other offerings.

If I had to pick a favorite, I'm afraid it'd come down to a tie. On one hand we have the "circle of friends" poster, detailing all the wonderful friends your life of drugs will introduce you to by showing a picture of four or five fat, sweaty white guys standing in a jail cell with their eyes blacked out. On the other we have the one with the pot leaf surrounded by every euphemism for marijuana my boss could think of, including a few I'm sure he made up. Being a 20-something suburbanite, I've met a few people who partake of this particular substance, and none of them have ever used the terms "bone", "sinsemilla" or "hog leg" before... although, I'm sure at least one does now that I've shown him the poster.

Mostly these posters are just harmless fun. They get a chuckle from employers who put them up in break rooms and office cubicles, and make them feel good because they're doing something to curb drug use in the workplace. Some of the information is tenuous at best, but there's only one poster I really think we should discontinue: the one with a giant picture of Osama bin Laden, along with the phrase "Osama says: buy more heroin!" I don't think I've ever had an order for this poster. Aside from the offensive implication that all drug users are terrorists, people probably just don't want a picture of the man himself hanging in the office. Except, maybe, as a dart board.

So that's what the peemeister does when not peemeistering: he prints out hilarious anti-drug propaganda on thick card stock and ships it to trucking companies and landscaping services all over this great country. God bless America, etc... just remember to stay away from the hog leg.

Another one of the slang terms used on the pot leaf poster is "sh*t", which I believe is pronounced "shasteriskt".

Why I love the ER blogs.

In the past month of no updates I have probably sat down to type something here about three dozen times, at least. Every single time, though, I had to erase what I had written because I realized all I was really doing was ranting like a lunatic. Which can admittedly be fun to read, but it's not the kind of stuff I like to write. I like relaying quirky stories about weird people taking drug tests, not six paragraphs of "rawr everyone is an idiot but me, rabble rabble rabble."

A lot of things have gone down in the tiny peemeister offices these past few weeks, and some of them have left me a bit shaken. But it's all office politics stuff, which isn't the focus of my blogging. It has cut me though, sometimes deeper than I would have figured was possible. Changes are happening, some good, some bad. Management has woken up and is starting to make some decisions... again, some good, some bad. Anyway, all the politicking has left me unable or unwilling to document the various zaniness I've come across while conducting my collections, and for that I apologize.

Things are starting to settle a little, I think.

One of the new decisions is the arbitrary blocking of half the internet from all our computers. I disagree with the decision for basically selfish reasons: I like the internet and I get cranky when it's taken away from me. I feel that in an office of a dozen or so people, if it's found that someone is abusing MySpace or whatever you can just block that address from that machine and be done with it. Er, there I go, ranting again. I'll stop now.

Anyway, the criteria for what is blocked and what isn't is pretty strange. Websites I used to hit once a day (comics, news sites, educational sites, and a forum or two) are gone now, even though I'm the only person in the office who would ever dream of visiting them. However, sites like LiveJournal and Blogger are unblocked, so I've been filling my days reading a lot more blogs than I used to.

I've never been much of a blog guy. I really love writing and sharing my experiences, but I don't take a lot of pleasure in reading the rants of others. There are several blogs I check daily, but they're either videogame related (and thus of no real value to anyone except gamers) or they're the awesome cream-of-the-crop blogs that everyone is already reading anyway. Maybe I'll put the links up someday.

For some reason though, I have discovered that I love the ER blogs. I love them. I can't get enough. I don't know how I found the first one, but after I finished the archives I pulled a random link from its blogroll and plowed through another one. The ER blogs captivate me.

I'm not really interested in the medical industry, even though I kinda sorta work in it (in the same way the janitor at CBS works in the "entertainment industry"). And a lot of the ER blogs are the "everyone is an idiot but me" rants I tend to roll my eyes at. So why do I love them so much? I think it's the combination of two things. First, they do have a point. Anyone who's sat an an ER for any length of time at peak hours sees the kind of absolute crap hospital employees deal with on a daily basis. It's enough to make anyone jaded. And second, jaded or not, the work they do is incredibly difficult and I would probably have a coronary just thinking about it.

In a few ways, reading all those ER blogs helped me realize that a lot of the petty nonsense I'm putting up with at work right now is just that: petty nonsense. I know perfectly well that my laziness and lack of compassion preclude me from ever doing the important and often thankless work they do. So I offer my heartfelt thanks to all of them, especially the ones who blog about their daily grind and share their experiences with the rest of us.

Here are three of the best ones I came across, which have made it onto my "check these daily" list:
http://ernursey.blogspot.com/
http://lastblogstanding.blogspot.com/
http://ambulancedriverfiles.blogspot.com/

Please note: this isn't any indication that the peemeistering is going to pick up anytime soon. Here's hoping, though!

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.

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.

24, and wasting my life.

I just turned 24 last month, which means now I can file for financial aid as an independant student.

It may or may not surprise you to learn that I haven't been to school in about five years. There are two major reasons for this. The first is that since I couldn't get financial aid (students under 24 have to file as dependant students, meaning their parents need to pay for part of their education, and my parents weren't anywhere near in a position to do that) I would have to pay for school out of my own pocket, which wasn't an attractive prospect. The second is that I had no real direction; no clue what, in fact, I wanted to go to school for. Since I didn't have a goal in mind, it seemed ridiculous to me to pay out a huge portion of my income or, even worse, take out thousands in loans.

I love school and I love learning, but I couldn't really justify that much expense for what would simply amount to a way to kill time.

Anyway, what happened was I landed the peemeister gig. This job, for all the complaining I do about it, is extremely sweet. I don't have a boss or any co-workers. My duties are simple and leave me with lots of spare time to surf the internet, play video games, or generally goof around. I can even sleep if I want to, right here in the office, while on the clock. I don't make a huge amount of money, but I do keep my bills paid and have enough left to buy fun toys and keep my girlfriend happy. I have health insurance and a retirement plan. I am awesome at making and sticking to a budget. I am financially stable and almost completely content.

Almost.

See, the problem is that there's this nagging thing in my head telling me that I'm wasting my life. My mother and other various family members agree with it. I'm not in school, I'm not working towards a career, I have no plans to start a family, yadda yadda yadda. Just the typical nagging that anyone in my shoes would go through.

As far as I'm concerned, life is really good and as long as I'm not placing the burden of myself in anyone else's lap and as long as I'm having fun doing it, I should go ahead and stay the course. Making my family proud of me is not a huge priority. And anyway, I'm more stable financially and emotionally than most of them were at 24. I don't really want a career or a family. What I want is constant access to the internet and video games, and a paycheck every week that covers all my ridiculous nerd hobbies.

I've somehow managed to find myself in the exact position I've wanted to be in ever since I realized I'd have to work for a living, and people tell me it's not good enough. I figure if I ever find myself not enjoying life this much, and really wishing for something more, it's never to late to pick up and get started on something else. I'm lazy, but I'm not hopeless. I'm a slacker but I'm not irresponsible.

Well okay... maybe I'm a little irresponsible.

Anyway, for better or worse, I'm 24 now and as far as the federal government is concerned that means I can get free money to help go to school. And, working the job I do, I really have no reason not to. So I applied for my aid and we'll see what happens. Of course, since my birthday is in the summer it means I won't get anything in time to go to school until next year, but that's fine with me.

There's a stack of PlayStation games here I need to get through, anyway, and Monday starts another week at the pee clinic.

4:30 am on Sunday morning. This post brought to you by way too much caffeine. I should go to bed, but I'll play more Warcraft instead.

Special rules for special people.

I said I was going to update yesterday, and I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't. I like writing these entries but I find the writing improves the longer I'm detached from a situation. If I were to have hopped right in yesterday, when I said I would, this would have just been a page-long incoherent rant. I know I still slip up from time to time and post those but I do try to avoid it. I would much rather wait a few days, cool down, and then reflect on what happened in order to tell an interesting story than just list the things at my office that piss me off and then glibly pop out a "people are stupid, hyuck hyuck hyuck."

So just for the record, I don't believe people are stupid nor do I hate my job. I believe people are selectively inattentive, and usually stubborn, and the combonation of those things often gives the appearance of stupid... but to someone who is being selectively inattentive and stubborn himself.

Which is not to say, of course, that some people aren't stupid, or that I don't deal with some stupid people here at the pee clinic... but those stories aren't as interesting as you might expect, which is why I don't write about them (often).

Anyway, enough about that. Let's talk about the special privelages one of my largest clients enjoy.

First, they get a huge break on their bill at the end of the month. The exact specifics of the deal I don't know (nor would I mention here if I did), but suffice it to say they pay less per drug test than most of my other clients.

Second, they send me a list monthly with all the people they're sending down to be tested, a courtesy I'm sure we would not extend to most clients. It simplifies things for them because they can easily identify who came down to my office and when.

Third, they get one day a week all to themselves. I come into the office and open a half-hour early, during which time I do collections only for this one client. All they have to do is get their guys here.

Fourth, I keep a sign-in sheet specifically for this company which I would fax to them at 9am each morning I opened early. That is, on the specific days the company does its random drug testing.

In theory, it looks like a very good deal for these guys. We're essentially bending over backwards for them. Problem is, they don't take advantage of what they've been given.

The lists of names? Always late. The early mornings Nobody shows up. And since nobody shows up, all I can fax them is an empty sign-in sheet, which is meaningless. What actually occurs is this: one person from the company will show up before 8am, when I am opened specially for his company. A few more people will trickle in throughout the day, often on my lunch break. Most of them show up the following day.

Really what this boils down to is: I am sick of getting up early for nothing. I'm sure everyone in America can sympathize.

The past few weeks I haven't bothered keeping a separate sign-in sheet because by the 9am deadline, the thing would only have one name on it. I received a phone call yesterday asking why this was, and I explained to the guy on the other end that the whole "separate sign-in sheet" only works if they actually manage to get their employees down here at the time they promised. I also told him that only one person was showing up during my early half-hour, and could we please try to fix that situation?

I didn't bring up the fact that it's now the end of June and I still don't have July's list.

Of course I'm not in any position to make demands of this guy or his company. The agreement reached was that I will continue coming in at 7:30 on the days he picks, and continue faxing him a sign-in sheet even if it is empty. A company as big as his (and please note that it is not "his company" so much at is "a company he works for, and is in charge of the department which handles drug testing") obviously the impression that things are running efficiently is more important than things actually runnin efficiently.

Oh well.

Hmm... that came out a little ranty anyway. I'll try to work on that.

The story I had planned to tell today was about Mexicans not having translators. But I've already told enough of those, haven't I?

Long stretches of time.

The truth of the matter is that the vast, vast majority of my time here at the office is empty. On a typical day that means less than an hour of actual work. As a result, there are sometimes long stretches of time in which nothing particularly interesting happens, leaving me nothing particularly interesting to write about.

But I mean, come one, how am I supposed to follow up that story from a month ago?

Still, a month without an update is pretty lame even for me. So rather than just leaving this space empty for another month (or until something neat happens, or the world ends, whichever comes first) I figured I'd regale you with a few minor tidbits that didn't really merit updates of their own.

---

About two weeks ago a man came in for a drug test. His name was Kareem Abdul Jabbar Jackson. I immediately decided that it was the most amazing name I had ever heard in my entire life.

---

On the subject of donor names... earlier this week I had an exceptionally slow day: only six collections. Four of those were for guys named Christopher. One was for a woman named Christine. The sixth was for a man named Cristobal. I think the six of them should get together and form a crime-fighting group called "The Super Chrises".

---

I actually did almost update a while ago, but now I'm glad I didn't. See, I was having one of those remarkably awful days, where everything set me off. A world-class bad mood, you might say. After a verbal boxing match over the phone with my bank I realized I had only five minutes left on my lunch break, so I hopped on my bike and flew down to McDonald's to buy some grub. I get back a few minutes after 2:00 and there are a couple people waiting for me. Cursing under my breath I set my food aside and took care of the collections.

What I almost updated about was this pompous holier-than-thou over-educated nitwit who took one look at my sack'o'burgers, scoffed, and then said "You really shouldn't eat that, you know."

For some reason I was so irritated at this guy's comment that I sat down and wrote a five-paragraph post about him, and about how I should be allowed to eat whatever I want, fast food or no, and who are you to comment? I had it all worked out, lambasting the whole uber-vegan subculture who look down their long, sickly noses at the unwashed masses who eat fast food.

Then, just to be sure I was a complete hypocrite, I went on to detail my actual eating habits, which include cooking a meal every night of the week and having fast food once in a while as an afterthought. I went on to contradict my previous paragraph, proceeding to bash people who did eat fast food on a regular basis and how unhealthy and unfulfilling a lifestyle choice that is.

As it turns out though, simply the act of typing all that out was enough to vent my frustrations. I went on to preview it and realized that nobody, anywhere, wants to read about my McDonald's misadventures, so I deleted the post. Dodged a bullet, there! Whew!

---

The lightswitch in my hallway is broken, and has somehow caused all the wiring in the two fluorescent lights it controls to melt and fuse to the bulbs. Thus the entire back half of my office was plunged into darkness. I told my boss to fix it; he bought me a lamp to stick in the hallway. Oh well.

---

I received my first formal complaint in over two years! One of our landscaping clients filed a complaint that I am "unnecessarily rude to our Hispanic employees". This is presumably because I refuse to drug test them without a translator... although they didn't mention that part.

It isn't going to happen, but I personally hope that we lose the client. We can't really provide the service they're asking for anyway; they hire an almost exclusively Mexican crew, and really need a drug test site that speaks Spanish. Why they don't simply shop around until they find one is beyond me. At the very least, why put up with someone who is "unnecessarily rude" to their employees?

---

So there it is, a couple half-interesting little tidbits all rolled into one. Hopefully something sufficiently post-worthy happens in the near future so I don't have to pull this trick twice in a row!

Last time someone was in to play with my lights, he poked it with a broom a few times and then gave up. Gee, I wonder why they don't work...

Disgusting jobs.

People always wonder how I can do my disgusting, filthy job. People wonder all the time how I manage to actually touch cups full of urine on a daily basis. Folks can't wrap their heads around it, but the truth of the matter is my job isn't all that disgusting. Mopping up a small puddle of urine (which is usually the most that happens, when accidents do happen) is no different than mopping up a small puddle of any other liquid.

Honestly, I prefer the smell of stale urine over some of the really rank cleaning products I end up using. Then there's my air freshener on top of that -- masking one smell with another, with another. If anything is disgusting, it's the smell of Glade Plug-ins and bug spray mingled with disinfectant and Lysol, combined with the aroma of slime-like bluing agent, with perhaps the slightest tinge of urine as an afterthought.

Keeping my office clean generally means vacuuming and mopping, keeping my paperwork in neat little stacks, and keeping the water in my toilet as blue as a smurf. Until today.

I can't sugar-coat this... the guy was fat. There's no dancing around a thing like this. This man did not have a weight problem, he had a weight catastrophe. That he could manage to walk without a cane or some other kind of support was mind-blowing, though calling his movements "walking" isn't exactly accurate. He would kind of swivel his hips and swing his arms as hard as he could to gain momentum, and any movement his feet actually made seemed to be incidental. One thing was for sure, when not in motion the man could not stand up on his own. He had to lean on something or fall over.

Please understand that I'm merely describing this man, not mocking him, although mockery was the least of his worries. He couldn't string a sentence together without gasping for breath halfway through. He was sweating through his sweatpants. His odor was pungent and foul. This was not your average, run-of-the-mill fat man, the kind we all know and love. This was someone with a serious, immediate problem that needs to be remedied. This man, you look at and feel an instant and overwhelming sense of pity, but at the same time you try to avert your eyes and breathe through your mouth.

A quick aside about my waterless urinal: it's basically just a drain on the wall with a little pocket inside for disinfectant (which, as noted above, smells worse than urine). It's actually the ideal tool for someone in my field, since it can't be flushed and puts the donor in a place where he cannot get any water whatsoever, running or otherwise. Furthermore, it reduces the chances of a donor flushing the toilet to exactly zero, which saves me from a lot of headaches. When a man asks to use the regular toilet, however, that's generally a red flag. Some men are incapable of doing so, and that's fine, but some simply want to cheat and need a readily avaialble source of water to do so.

I was willing to make an exception in this man's case, though, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how he was going to be able to aim the stream into the waterless urinal. He had seen the two men in front of him use the waterless urinal so he knew it existed, and when I asked if he needed a regular toilet he became embarrassed and said no, he could do it just fine.

This did not turn out to be the case.

While he was in the men's room working on filling his cup I was in the lobby filling out paperwork for the two donors behind him. Just as I was finishing up the second set of forms I hear a loud crash from the bathroom. I rushed back and asked if he was okay.

"I made a mess," he said.

It took him a few minutes but he eventually got up, and cracked the door open. He didn't want to open it all the way and reveal the fruits of his labor, but at the same time he couldn't fit through the half-opened door. He was beet red, but whether that was because he was completley out of breath or utterly mortified, I have no way of knowing. Probably a combination of the two.

In no uncertain terms, this man had fallen over somehow in the bathroom and lost control of his bowels. Green, murky diarrhea covered the back of his pants and most of one arm, not to mention my bathroom floor. His sample cup was discarded amidst his leavings. It was empty, not because he had spilled it, but because he hadn't filled it in the first place.

He forced his way past me so he didn't have to see the look on my face as the mess came into full view. He choked out some apologies on his way out the door. I was left with the task of cleaning up after him. The two people in my lobby had begun to wrinkle their noses, the looks of disgust impossible to hide. The young lady excused herself.

I set about my undesirable task, armed with everything in my cleaning arsenal. Fifteen grisly minutes later my men's room was back in pristine condition. It was the most horrible mess I'd ever cleaned up in my life.

I still felt extreme amounts of pity for this man, but now I was angry with him as well. It's rather common for men to not be able to do number one without first doing number two, I'm sure it happens to everyone. But I had offered this guy an out. Had he been sitting on the toilet he would have never slipped and, even if he had somehow, clean-up would have been as easy as flushing. Sure, his drug test would have been ruined. But isn't that better than the alternative?

I'm aware he was just embarrassed and sensitive about his weight, but I'm betting that after leaving here he went straight through a McDonald's drive-thru for some comfort food. I sometimes wonder if incidents like these form the catalyst in someone's life, where they clearly identify a change they need to make and then get motivated enough to change it. But somehow I think that only happens in movies. As it stands this man is in seriously bad health and is at best a horrible inconvenience to the people who have to put up with him. Nobody can help him but himself, and even in situations as silly as drug testing he's unwilling to do even that.

As for me, for the rest of the day there's an odor lingering about that drowns out even the disinfectants and Pine Sol. And it's hard to be excited about that.

When the young lady came back in she blurted out, "I didn't leave because of the fat -- because of the obese guy, I mean -- I just wanted a cigarette." At that point, I would have welcomed the smell of a cigarette.

An open letter.

My last post was about a mean old hag who yelled at me for doing one of her office's collections. This was a strange and highly unlikely scenario in which either office could have done the collection, so I had not made a mistake. Nonetheless I have been instructed by my employer not to do collections for that office's MRO, and I have not done so since the incident.

This would be much easier if that other office would keep a closer eye on their people, though. Just now a woman walked in with the very form I have been ordered not to touch, saying she was sent over because she had a Mapquest printout with my address on it. Obviously the clerk looked at the address, rather than the actual paperwork, and kicked the woman out so they could get their line moving faster. So now this poor woman has been ping-ponged between two different drug test offices and has had to wait through their insane line twice.

This is an open letter to the mean old hag who yelled at me last week.

Dear Old Hag,

You should focus more on governing your own employees and less on hassling me. Something you may not know: people don't like taking drug tests. It's embarrassing. It can be frustrating. It can be time-consuming, especially if the office has a long wait. It can also be confusing, since there are so many offices and so many rules and so many different forms. But honestly, it only takes a few seconds to actually look at the paperwork in front of your face before dismissing it out of hand.

I have my own little procedure when I see a form I don't recognize. First, I check for any overt, obvious signs of your office's name. If I see one, I send the donor on over. Also, I know several of your clients by name as well, so there are some occassions where I can just look at the company name on the form and know it's yours. If I don't know, I call my boss, who can run the name of the donor's company against our own database to see if maybe it's just one of our clients I don't recognize. If they have a map or an address and have just shown up in the wrong place entirely, I offer to call the office they need to be at and get them directions. These are courtesies I extend to these people because I am a decent human being.

As for the endless barrage of people you send over to me who are neither my client nor yours, I really don't mind that. You aren't willing to help them get where they need to be; I am. I look like a saint, you look like a jerk, and the donor ends up in the right place. Everybody wins. Except you, jerk.

The reason people go to your office with your form but my map is because I am listed as a third-party collector for that particular lab. That means it is your responsibility to make sure your employees actually bother to look at the form the person is carrying so people aren't inconvenienced any more than is necessary. It's a sad, sad day when some punk kid can run an office better than an entire team of supposedly qualified employees, isnt it?

Love, the Peemeister

Next time this happens I'm going to just do the collection. Hey, they obviously don't want it!

No loud noises, sudden movements, or flash photography.

Today's tale is the kind that is too crazy to make up.

I'll just go ahead and get the fun part out of the way. The inconceivable has, after 2.5 years, finally happened: I've spilled a sample.

Yeah. Ewwwww.

For the record: urine isn't harmful in any way. Go ahead, splash around in it. Gargle the stuff. Put it on your cereal. Whatever. It can't really hurt you. There's no potential health hazard to spilling a cup of urine near or on yourself. So I'm not going to break out in pee-pox or anything, it just doesn't work like that.

Also for the record: it wasn't my fault. Just stop laughing and wait until you hear the story.

It's a normal collection all the way through, save for the weird questions Mr. Dawg is asking me. "Is you all alone in here, all day?" Yep. "So someone could just roll in here and rob the joint?" I suppose so, though all they'd get is my pocket change and a few boxes of sample cups. "Yo I got a license for this 9 millimeter in my pocket, aight?" (He doesn't actually have a gun. This is apparently a funny joke that people like to make.)

As I'm trying to give him instructions, Mr. Dawg blurts out, "Hey, yo, son, so like you drive the peemobile?"

Yes. Of course I do.

I don't know why Mr. Dawg had it in for me. Perhaps it had something to do with my complete lack of interest in his "jokes" and diversions. If you poke around the "how to cheat on drug test" sites enough, one of the suggestions they have is to try and distract the collector. Try to get them to skip a step. Try to fill out the form wrong. I wonder if that's what creates the Mr. Dawgs of the world: feeble attempts to keep my mind off the procedure. Create a loophole he can slip through later when his test inevitably comes back positive.

Well, Mr. Dawg actually managed to do it. Well done.

There is one crucial point in the collection which requires my undivided attention: pouring the sample from the cup into the bottle. Imagine trying to pour a quantity of liquid from a measuring cup into a two-liter soda bottle. That's about the ballpark here. It's not difficult, but if you slip you have a mess on your hands. Right at this crucial moment, the pouring, the sacred three-second ritual where I am not paying any attention at all to the donor... Mr. Dawg starts barking like a dog.

Loudly. And suddenly. Like a Baha Men concert in my brain. Like a crazed Arsenio Hall fanboy on speed.

My whole body jolts. The cup falls to the floor. The bottle tips over on the counter. 40-some mililiters of ick go spilling everywhere.

Mr. Dawg just bursts out laughing.

"What is your problem!?" I shout, wishing he really did have a gun in his pocket so I'd have something to murder him with. No court would convict me. "Your honor, the defendant's act was fully justified. The victim made him spill pee."

As Mr. Dawg is exploding with laughter, I quickly realize three things. First, there obviously isn't enough urine in the bottle to complete this collection. Second, this is not going to be a pretty clean up job. Third, the form is drenched and I can't replace it (as I don't keep spare forms for that particular lab).

I tell Mr. Dawg that because of his unacceptable juvenile behavior, he now has to go get another form if he wants to complete this collection. I also inform him that he won't be doing it here.

"Naw man, I done everything you said, I ain't gotta do nothin' else."

"Okay, fine. You can leave, then."

Mr. Dawg exits, still chuckling. I get my mop, my sponge, and various spray bottles and set to work making my workspace livable again.

No sooner am I done drying the area do I get a phone call from Mr. Dawg's would-be employer. "He says you spilled his, er, sample, and then got mad and kicked him out."

I delight in detailing exactly how I managed to spill his, er, sample. The employer doesn't believe me. I wouldn't believe me either. He was barking like a dog? Yeah, right.

"We're just going to give him another form, and send him back. You close at 1:00, right?"

"Yes, but don't bother. I'm not going to do this collection."

"Excuse me?"

"Mr. Dawg's conduct was immature and I'm not having it. Check your list of third party collection sites and send him to another one."

"Wait. You can't do that."

"If he comes back here, new form or no, I'll refuse to do the collection. It's that simple."

"Who is your supervisor at [insert lab name here]?"

"I don't have one. I'm a third party collector, just like the other two dozen collection sites in the area, one of which will soon be as amused as I was by Mr. Dawg's childish antics."

"This isn't the way to do business."

"That's really a shame. I have to go now. Good day."

I really did have to go. Another client had walked in, and this one had the decency to not ruin my morning by acting like a five-year-old.

I don't really have any reason to believe that Mr. Dawg was trying to screw up the test on purpose. It's possible he just never learned the few basic rules of civility the rest of us take for granted. It's possible he actually thought he was being funny, that I'd just laugh it off and, I dunno, siphon the spilled bladder-juice into the bottle with a straw. It's possible he thought I'd hang his sopping form on some clothespins to dry, go out and have a beer with him, and someday tell my grandchildren about the greatest comedian I'd ever met.

The how-to-cheat sites tell you to try and disrupt the process. Now more than ever I know that's just an extra reason to pay attention. My general policy is that if someone acts stupid, treat them like they're stupid. If you don't want to be embarrassed, don't act like you're mentally incapable of accomplishing simple tasks without being a jerk. Either way, acting like a clown won't get you under my radar. But it might get you kicked out of my office.

In the rare case something on the form actually does end up wrong, the lab just faxes me an affidavit to sign and that's the end of it. So screwing with the form isn't even a good way to cheat. Go figure.

Truck versus me.

I was just now very nearly pulverized by a semi truck.

Once every two weeks I bike down to the nearest mall on my lunch break to deposit my paychecks and indulge in a Target shopping spree. It's a long but straightforward ride along a stretch of road famously thick with large trucks. There are no sidewalks for most of the way, but instead large shoulders along the side of the road, so it only looks perilous. Two years of riding a bike to work and back have taught me to be extremely vigilant when I'm out and about. Even moreso than in a car, making a mistake while on a bike can get you killed. Heck, someone else making a mistake can get you killed. So to say I'm a careful bicyclist is understating it.

Competing with motorists who make expedient left-hand turns often provides the greatest challenge. Now, we've all done this: you need to make a left-hand turn onto a sidestreet or into a parking lot. You don't have a traffic light. You see an opening and you gun it. That's what this guy in the giant white semi truck did. The difference between this truck driver and you, I should hope, is that you check for pedestrians before shooting out across three lanes of traffic.

I saw the guy there with his signal on. I saw he didn't have enough room to make a turn. I saw that I had plenty of time to cross the sidestreet in front of him. These are the split-second judgments one makes all the time while operating a vehicle. On this occasion though, I misjudged. With a roar the truck came barreling towards me.

Usually in this situation I can just maintain my speed and zoom through the road, but the semi was just too big and was traveling too fast. I would have never made it. So I cut hard right instead, forcing a breakneck U-turn and sending me tumbling through some bushes and skidding across a parking lot. Then for a few moments the only things I was aware of were the earpieces of my mp3 player, which had miraculously not fallen out during the crash.

I pushed my bike off of my face and picked myself up. My right arm and wrist were shredded by the gravelly asphalt of the parking lot. The truck was nowhere to be seen. Either the driver literally didn't see me at all, or he didn't care enough to stop and see if I was hurt. An old woman in a red Buick made a right-hand turn behind the truck. She stopped to make sure I wasn't dead, which was damned decent of her. I wasn't seriously hurt, and my bike seemed to still work.

The woman looked quite shaken. She asked if I got the license plate of the truck. When I said no, she offered to drive me down the road to find the bastard and get the number. Really, all I wanted was to get back to work and get washed up. Besides, lots of large white trucks turn down this road, and they all look the same to me.

As I brushed myself off the old lady walked back to the road where I was almost struck and retrieved my Target bag. It had been ripped off of my handlebars when I turned so harshly -- that's how close I came to being obliterated. The Nintendo DS game I just purchased was smashed, presumably by one of the truck's back tires. As she handed the bag to me, she looked white as a ghost. I thanked her for her help, assured her nothing was broken, and wished her a Happy Holidays. She did the same and then got back in her car.

And so I slinked back to the pee clinic, scraped and bruised and more than a bit shaken. Fortunately only the box of my DS game is crushed; the game itself looks fine. My injuries looked much worse on the side of the road than they do now that I've washed them out and they've stopped bleeding. This isn't the first incident I've had on my bike; it's not even the worst. But it is the first time actual human interaction was involved.

Tis the season, I suppose. And a Happy Holidays to you all from the Peemeister who, for now, is still alive.

The song on my mp3 player at the time of the incident was "Your Horoscope For Today" by Weird Al Yankovic. I don't know if that's meaningful in the great cosmic scheme of things.

I did not "miss" the Bucs game.

Thanksgiving day, and I'm sitting in the living room with my cousin and my brother, and we're watching Titanic. Polite banter is passed back and forth about the movie. Cool special effects are pointed out. The soundtrack is made fun of. We're not watching the movie so much as using it as an excuse for conversation.

An uncle walks in the room and laments, "Oh man, I can't believe you guys aren't watching the game!"

Why on earth would I want to watch "the game" when there's a perfectly good movie on?

Quite frequently someone will come into the pee clinic and attempt to start conversation about whatever sports season it is. "Did I see last night's game?" No, I didn't. "Oh man, you missed a good one!" Can't very well miss something I didn't try to catch.

I see this hurt look in their eyes when I tell them I don't follow sports. Some people stare at me as though I'm an alien creature, altogether new and strange in a world they thought they knew. Some look as though they take offense, as though foot/base/basketball is a device that is hooked directly into their heart, and my dismissal of the practice served to interrupt the flow of blood to their brain.

Some simply don't comprehend my point at all.

"Oh, not a Bucs fan, huh?" No, not really. "Then who do you like?" What do you mean? "Which team do you like?" I don't really like any of them. "Come on, you gotta root for someone." I don't like football. "Oh. Baseball, then?"

It's not as though I have some kind of overt anti-sports agenda. I mean, I do, but I don't push it down anyone's throat. I just try to take a polite exit out of the conversation and leave it at that. Just about everyone agrees that politics and religion are off-limits as far as discussions between strangers... but apparently rejecting chitchat about sports is sacrelige.

I suppose I understand what's going on here. People want smalltalk, but they don't know me so they don't know what to talk about. This is true for everyone. That's why the first thing out of everyone's mouth when they talk to you in the line at the bank is the weather. Everyone deals with the weather. Everyone can talk about that. Even the most socially deficient rock-troglodyte can admit that, yeah, it's been pretty windy lately.

Once weather is covered (which, in Florida, means the conversation is either about how "hot" or "very hot" it is), the next logical topic is sports. That's usually the one place you can find common ground with just about anyone without offending them or making assumptions about them. I imagine when people hear "I don't like sports" something in their brain shuts down and they refuse to believe it.

People see my PS2 and ask if I picked up Madden '06 yet. "No," I reply. "I prefer to spend my money on good games." And I have to wonder what the game shelf at the guy's house looks like. Does he really just have this huge string of football games, each one slightly nicer looking than the last, with a new year tacked onto the title? How many football games do you have to watch before they all start to look the same?

When people complain about the lack of variety in my magazines (they're all sports and car magazines) I point out that I used to have subscriptions to Wired and Skeptical Inquirer and Game Informer, but people kept stealing them. So either everyone already has the most recent Sports Illustrated, or nobody cares about it enough to steal it. (I could put a joke here about the stereotypical sports fan not being able to read, but that would make me look like a real prick, so I won't.)

After Thanksgiving dinner was over and everyone kind of shuffled off into their own little clique somewhere, I peeked in on that weird old uncle I mentioned earlier. He was sitting in the living room, alone, watching his game. And they say I'm the most anti-social person in the family.

It's not that I try to avoid conversation at any cost. Just ask the guy who struck up a conversation about World of Warcraft... we must have chattered for half an hour before either of us remembered there was a drug test he was supposed to take.

My kingdom for paper towels.

Working in an office by myself is essentially a dream come true for me. Virtually limitless peace and quiet, no supervisors breathing down my neck, no annoying co-workers I have to pretend to like. I decide what needs done and when. I'm free to handle the rigors of my day-to-day operation in essentially any way I see fit. Aside from the schedule and the rules directly relating to collection, I'm my own boss.

Except when it comes to supplies.

Pens and soap, forms and kits, toilet paper and bluing agent -- these are things that, despite my best intentions, will eventually run out. When I'm low on something I have to send a fax up to my bosses and pray they don't ignore it. On one occasion where I was without on-site collection kits for three days my supervisor apologetically explained, "You do such a good job up there that nobody complains about you. So sometimes we forget you're even there."

Isn't that touching?

Currently I am involved in trench warfare concerning, of all things, paper towels.

Let me explain something to you people. It doesn't take a fistful of paper towels to dry your hands. There's enough real estate on two towels to cover the average pair of human hands, including in between the fingers. Maybe three sheets if you have exceptionally large or exceptionally hairy hands. Maybe four if you're the missing link.

The reason I run out of paper towels far faster than any other commodity is because people tear them out of the dispenser like they're going out of style. Five, six, seven towels -- gone in a flash. Double that if the person washes up after the collection as well. Donors descend on paper towels as though a hunger consumes them, raw and primal.

While I find this practice irritating, another block of paper towels is usually only twenty steps away in my back room. I can get the key to the dispenser, acquire a fresh block of towels, and have everything stocked and ready to go in the time it takes the donor to squeeze out a sample. They emerge from the bathroom, none the wiser.

This assumes, of course, I have the towels to begin with. Right now, I have half a roll of generic kitchen towels to cover both bathrooms. This is because, for some reason, my supervisors can't or won't send me a box of my usual stuff. Imagine my chagrin when I send another desperate fax up top, pleading for paper towels, only to have the boss's wife come skipping up a half-hour later with a single roll of kitchen towels.

It won't last me the day.

This story is about two weeks old now, and has not concluded yet. Until I get a box of those lovely, beautiful brown bricks of paper I will be on edge.

People absolutely hate having to dry their hands on their pants. Absolutely nothing in the drug testing procedure solicits the kind of verbal abuse that asking someone to wash, but not dry, their hands does. I still vividly remember an occasion where a man was so irate about the lack of paper products in my office that he actually reached out to dry his mitts on my shirt.

I wonder if this is something the powers that be over at the main office do to remind me that, yes, they are the ones still in charge. "We'll let him stew a bit," they say, "and we'll send him his paper towels when we are good and ready. He will receive the pittance we give him and he will be damn grateful for it."

Time to send another not-so-polite fax upstairs, explaining the situation. It's war, man. The lines have been drawn and the stakes have been raised. It's Towelgate 2005. There is nothing short of a worldwide communist conspiracy in place keeping me from my paper towels.

The current record of paper towel consumption for a single collection is nineteen. That guy had the driest hands on Earth once he was through.