Off my game.

My girlfriend and I moved into our new apartment last weekend. Our respective families got together to move all our heavy furniture and video games, so it was decided that I would buy McDonald's for everyone. My brother and I ran down to the nearest branch, smack-dab in the middle of the Saturday lunch rush.

A man burst in holding his cell phone, complaining he had gone through the drive-thru and not received any straws. He muscled his way through everyone else in line and raised a huge fuss, even after one of the clerks had given him some straws. He demanded to see the manager. He demanded the manager give him free food. "I called ya'll from the parking lot and ain't none of ya picked up the phone! What kinda business is this!?"

The kind that is busier than hell at 12:30pm on a Saturday, Jethro. It was a simple, human mistake. Calm down.

I told you that story to tell you this story...

A young lady appears, 18 or 19 years old. I was already fairly shaken from my last two harrowing drug test experiences (see below) and I was more or less just ready to not do any more collections today and go take a nap. In retrospect, maybe I should have.

The young lady puts her purse in the lockbox and washes her hands as I do the paperwork. She points out helpfully, "Isn't that the wrong date?"

Sure enough, it was. "You're right," I told her, "thanks." I changed the date and handed her the cup.

"Thanks," she said, going into the bathroom. Then she paused. "Um... do I need to close this myself?"

I had forgotten to lock the lockbox. Curses. Kind of defeats the purpose of the lockbox, doesn't it?

I squeeze past her and lock it up, and repeat the instructions to her. A few minutes later she comes back with the sample, which I pour into the bottle, which she then initials.

It isn't until after she's signed her form and I've sealed everything up that I realize I'd forgotten to sign my copy.

With an ample supply of egg on my face, I explain that I now have to cut open the sample bag and remove the paperwork due to an error on my part. "I apologize, I'm usually not this far off my game."

She seemed amused.

Workers in the service industry labor under the misbelief that people, in general, are stupid. A first-time Starbucks customer who orders a small coffee instead of a tall coffee, for example, does so not because he hasn't been educated on the labyrinthine nuances of Starbucks's menu, but because he is a gibbering troglodyte unworthy of human interaction. They take his $6.50 and then laugh at him in the break room.

It took me a long time, and several customer service jobs, to finally realize that the stupidity myth is pretty baseless. It has more to do with everyone being human, than anyone being stupid. Everyone makes mistakes, and in a culture that demands perfection this looks like stupidity. Nobody knows everything, but everyone expects that of everyone else.

I, like you, make a lot of mistakes at my job. And, like you, I'm able to correct the vast majority of them before they become issues. But once in a while I'll be completely out of the lines, and I'll have to fess up. It's not a big deal. It happens.

The young lady whose urine I was packing up probably thought I was one of the unwashed gibbering troglodytes whom she would soon be making fun of in the break room of the check cashing place that just hired her. Oh well.

After dealing with the irate man's straws, the McDonald's clerk handed me my food. I noticed she had forgotten my drinks. I pointed it out to her politely, and she retrieved them for me with a quick "Sorry about that, have a nice day." I thought that was a fairly good solution to our little problem, rather than raising hell and looking like a total jerk, just for a free box of fries.

Two mistakes in a row. I don't know if that's good or bad for a McDonald's clerk, but I tend to think she was just a little off her game. As are we all, from time to time.

And this was anecdote the third, which concludes my stories of the longest drug testing day ever. Hope you enjoyed them.

Ahem... well...

Not 24 hours after that tirade about how important it is that drug test procedures, no matter how silly or inane, must be followed to the letter, I get a phone call from our lab saying all the collections I took yesterday have the wrong date on them.

So, color me retarded.

Let's see... 25 botched collections at $120,000 a piece... that's $3 million I just lost my company. Hooray! I am so fired.

Not really. Don't worry folks, looks like the Peemeister is here to stay.

"But it's only a drug test...!"

If you love to read long court summaries where a drug test collector gets himself raped through the ear, you're going to totally dig this:

http://tinyurl.com/rcawu

Basically, here's what happened. This woman goes in for a DOT drug test, is found positive for THC, and then walks away with $120,000 in medical expenses, emotional distress and lost wages. Why? Because the collector screwed up.

The collector admitted that his office did not carry a copy of the DOT regulations, did not secure the bathroom before the donor went in, did not instruct the donor to wash her hands and failed to add a bluing agent to the toilet bowl.

Whether or not the woman's story about the collector mixing her sample up with some other donor's sample is true is completely irrelevant. Point is, admitting the first couple blunders before a jury is just giving credence to anything else someone else wants to pile on top of it.

This is the reason I'm a total nazi about following the collection regulations. This is why everyone empties their pockets, washes their hands and reads the form. One little slip-up and my company is out $120,000

Note that I'm not disagreeing with the verdict; heck, if I saw an opportunity to cash in on a slipshot drug test collection, I'd gobble it up.

The crime of eating lunch.

My lunch hour is between 1pm and 2pm. As I am the only employee in my office, this means the office is closed between 1pm and 2pm.

Back when I was a new, idealistic peemeister (a peeprentice as it were) I would often blur the lines of my precious, precious lunch hour. If someone had to stay past 1pm that was cool with me. If I was here and someone knocked on the door at 1:30, that was cool also. And I would almost always open up early, say at 1:45 or 1:50.

Indeed, I felt horribly guilty if I didn't do these things.

What started to happen, though, was that I would start missing lunch with alarming frequency. What started as a person saying "I'll be ready to go in ten minutes, fifteen tops" would metamorph into a ninety-minute ordeal. What started as "I really didn't know you closed at 1pm" would eventually become "I know you close at 1pm but can you take me anyway?"

I probably told myself that since my office was never very busy, I'd only end up missing lunch once in a blue moon. In reality I ended up sacrificing half of my lunch hour or more at least once a week.

It was Mr. Friendly that caused me to finally and firmly adopt my current policy of "closed, no matter what". Mr. Friendly came in about 11am. He tried to drop a sample and failed, as people often do. He was thus faced with a choice: stay and try again, or return later. Since he had errands to run he said he'd come back later.

No problem. I explain that I can only save his paperwork for 24 hours, and that I take my lunch from 1pm to 2pm. If he planned to come back that afternoon he would have to wait until after 2pm. Mr. Friendly agreed; after all, he was friendly.

I had to take care of some personal affairs over the phone that day. I generally like to do this from my office during my lunch hour, since it's my only spare time during the day when the businesses I needed to contact would be open and I was sure I wouldn't be interrupted. Any other time of the day I might get halfway through a transaction and then have to leave abruptly to collect some pee.

It must have been 1:20 or so when Mr. Friendly returned. He looked at my Will Return sign in disgust and banged on my door. I went to answer it.

"What, did you close early today?"

"No, I'm on my lunch break. Can you come back after 2?"

(Note how poorly I worded that -- as though he should have a choice in the matter.)

"Not really," said Mr. Friendly, "see I have to pick my kids up from school at 2:30and before that I have to pick my clothes up from the laundromat, and my car's in the shop so I have a taxi waiting on me."

Foolishly sympathizing with Mr. Friendly's plight, I let him in.

"Hopefully you'll be able to go right away," I told him. "I haven't had a chance to go get my lunch yet."

"No problem, I'm ready to go right now."

Except he wasn't.

A half hour ticked by. I was in a position where if I couldn't get rid of Mr. Friendly right now I would have to go hungry. I tell him as much.

"Look man," says Mr. Friendly, suddenly not-so-friendly, "we don't need to make a thing out of it. You don't have to be so cold all the time. Just lighten up a little!"

Of course it wasn't a matter of me not being able to lighten up. It was a matter of me wanting to eat something for lunch.

"I'm not asking for very much here, just do your job and help me out."

As if I weren't already helping him out by opening the door for him while my office was closed.

Mr. Friendly was there so long that eventually, defeated, I had no choice but to flip my Will Return sign back around to Open. Another day without sustenance. I was not happy and it was pretty easy to tell that Mr. Friendly knew it.

Mr. Friendly took this as an affront to his very being.

"You've never been in sales, have you? I can tell you've never worked sales, because you have such a terrible personality. If you worked sales you'd be fired," he told me.

"I don't get paid to be your friend," I snapped back.

After Mr. Friendly's collection was finally done, nearly forty-five minutes after he arrived, he said he was going to file a complaint against me for being unpersonable. I offered to get my boss on the phone for him right away, but he declined. So, in a charitable act of pleasantness, I wrote my boss's phone number on a Post-It note so he could call her at his convenience. He did not want the note.

"Oh no," I growled, "I insist."

He snatched the note, slammed my door and stomped off.

I was feeling so smug and abused for a while that I decided it would be a good idea to close my office down later in the afternoon to give me time to go buy a sandwich. After a long line at Subway and a short walk back to work in the rain, I was greeted by six or seven guys from a roofing company. They were soaking wet. Some looked confused and some looked angry. As I was unlocking the door the leader mentioned he thought we were closed between 1 and 2.

"Sorry," I muttered. "I had to work through lunch today."

Suddenly all my smugness and superiority evaporated. Closing down the office during the afternoon was not acceptable, no matter how hard I had worked to rationalize it in my head. My employer already gives me time to eat lunch -- it's called my lunch hour. I had chosen to squander it time and again, and I had no one to blame for it but myself.

Mr. Friendly, as it turns out, was absolutely right. He wasn't trying to inconvenience me. The only difference between him and all the other people who take 45 minutes to pee is that I chose to let him in when my office was supposed to be closed. It was my decision, not his.

To my knowledge Mr. Friendly never did call to complain about me. Nonetheless I decided that I would never work through lunch again. I still fudge the clock a bit here and there (if you have to wait until 1:15 that's fine, but any longer than that and you can bet I'm kicking you out) and there are the extraordinarily odd days where I don't have a choice in the matter (a subset of collections must be done in one sitting, as opposed to offering the option for the donor to come back later). But the Mr. Friendlys of the world have been turned away ever since.

I know people hate it when it's 1:50 and they look in the window seeing me eat my Chef Boyardee or my Uncle Ben's Rice Bowl or my Campbell's Chunky Soup. I know they probably can't process the information -- the dude, he's like right there, why won't he open the door!?

But there's a reason for it. I work an eight-hour day and I'm entitled to a lunch break. I learned the hard way I need to take advantage of it. And besides, it's not like these companies who send folks down to me are blindsided. My office hours are very clearly printed on all my paperwork and on the company website. If someone chooses to show up forty minutes before I open my door... well, that's their fault. Not mine. And look -- I didn't even have to do any mental gymnastics to rationalize it.

By the time I was done with those six or seven roofer guys the bacon on my sandwich was cold. I ate about half of it and threw it away, and felt incredibly guilty.

He's really short.

It occurs to me that someone could read my blog and come away with the impression that I either never make mistakes, or that I make them all the time and blame them on other people. However, I made what is possibly the stupidest, most embarrassing mistake of my entire life just the other day.

I'm filling out this gentleman's form. His first name is Gary, and his last name starts with "Co" and ends with "n". Without thinking, on reflex alone I write "Gary Coleman" on my form.

Really, that's the whole story. What else do I need to say about it?

The guy was like six feet tall, and wasn't black. Nevertheless, he wasn't pleased.

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.

Shouldn't have said that.

Working in the service industry, one learns to hold one's tongue.

Of course there are other times where one simply cannot help being a snarky bastard.

Every so often I'll get lippy with a client, and realize what I'm saying is wrong even as I'm saying it. I thought I'd share some of those experiences today.

---

A lady walks in and she's hopping mad. Beet red, steam firing from the gaskets behind her ears, and a scowl on her face that threatens to wrench her jaw clear off of her skull. "There is NO sign out there," she declares. "They said there would be a huge sign that says [my company's name] on it, but there is NO sign."

I stare past her at the huge sign in my window, perfectly visible from any and all angles at quite a distance. The only way she could have missed it is if she wasn't bothering to look for it. I apologize for the inconvenience and we get on with the collection.

She's so burning mad about this sign thing that she isn't listening to my intructions. I go through the entire spiel (wash your hands, don't flush the toilet, etc) twice before she snatches the cup out of my hands and stomps into the bathroom. About three minutes later, the toilet flushes. She comes out and I inform her that a second collection will have to be done, as she flushed the toilet.

"What!? You didn't tell me that!"

Of course I did. Twice, in fact.

"Well, you should put a giant sign in the bathroom saying it!"

"There was one, ma'am; you just didn't see it."

I winced. Shouldn't have said that.

---

A woman comes in with her two screaming children. These are children of an age where they should be able to go out into public without screaming. I had them pegged at about nine and twelve; definately capable of sitting quietly for a few minutes while Mommy tends to her business.

I quickly see where they get it from; Mommy is a 40-year-old brat. She insists on making the entire process as difficult as possible. She doesn't want to leave her purse behind. She doesn't want to wash her hands. She whines about just having her nails done. "You are welcome to come back tomorrow, ma'am," I offer, genuinely wanting her out of my hair.

Instead, she decides to redifine "washing your hands" as "holding your hands under running water for less than two seconds". I ask her to wash them again, properly this time.

"I just washed them."

"Please wash them again, using the soap provided." When detailing common sense instructions at point-blank range, I find it's best to use a firm but polite voice. But really, there's no way you can teach a grown adult how to wash her hands without sounding condescending. I hear her kids giggle from the lobby. The woman turns red.

She washes her hands again, while I watch. This time she makes a show of scrubbing them, but hasn't actually touched the soap. As she goes to reach for a paper towel, I ask her: "Did you use soap?"

"Of course I did."

"I didn't see you use any soap."

"Then you must be blind."

"I'll need you to wash your hands again, using the soap provided," I repeat.

She does so, using nearly half the bottle of soap. As she furiously scrubs the skin off the back of her hands she remarks, "I'm a grown woman, you can stop treating me like a child."

"I will, as soon as you stop acting like one."

The kids in the lobby are howling. The woman glares at me for a moment, then grabs her purse (without stopping to dry her hands), wrenches both of her kids from their chairs and drags them out to her minivan. She never comes back to complete the collection.

Whoops. Shouldn't have said that.

---

Four men come in, needing a drug test to get their coast guard licenses in order so they can take their commercial fishing boat out. One of them had called me about an hour prior to get my address. He drove here from the other end of the county for some reason. He insisted that he needed to come to this office, even though he could have gone to literally any drug test collection site he wanted. I don't keep any of my competitor's names and addresses handy, though, and because I couldn't point him to another office he decided it was in his best interests to travel for forty-five minutes and interrupt me just as I was about to take my lunch break.

I call in their company credit card, which is charged for four tests. The first three collections go down without a hitch. The fourth man, however, doesn't have a photo ID. He left it in his wallet, which is back at work.

"No problem. Which of you gentlemen is his supervisor?" I'm assuming here that one of the guys is the supervisor or overseer or whatever nautical term applies. But they just exchange glances. "None of us," on of them says. "We just work on the boat."

"Without a photo ID or a supervisor here in person, I can't do his collection," I point out.

Now everyone gets angry.

"Why do you need his ID? You have the man right here!"

"All three of us can vouch for him."

"None of us can go back to work until this is done!"

Much whining and groaning ensues, but there's nothing I can do for them. It's not my fault the guy left his ID laying somewhere. As hostilities start to rise I point out this simple fact. "No, but it's your fault for not telling him to bring it!"

"Excuse me?"

"You never said we'd need our IDs!"

"I assumed you knew. It's pretty much a given. You three didn't forget yours, even without being told."

From this point on it's all my fault. Even though the man without his ID was not the man I spoke to on the phone, I somehow should have still contacted him telepathically and reminded him to do something that every other adult in the United States does every day of their lives just out of habit.

Fed up with the accusations, I look at the ID-less man right in the eyes. He must be at least 20 years older than me. "Sir, you need to carry your ID at all times. I apologize if nobody has informed you of this, but in our society it is expected that all legal adults have a form of photo identification on them" I launch into a lecture about the exact purpose of photo identification, where he can acquire one, etc. I talk to him like he's an absolute idiot; obviously his co-workers think he is.

The four men storm out. The first three are angry, the fourth merely incredibly humiliated. I never did find out if they bothered to ask for a refund.

Definately shouldn't have said that.

Do you think there's some kind of connection between moments like these, and being forced by stubborn clients to point out the glaringly obvious? Nah, couldn't be...

Fun with the new lab.

Up until this week I only took collections for one lab and one lab only. Every single sample I collected was sent to the same place for testing, and every single result was sent to the same place for verification before being reported. Monday my company added itself to the list of approved collection sites for a fairly large nationwide laboratory, which has very nearly doubled my workload and added a whole new set of rules to play by.

Hey, no sweat. I dig rules.

If you've ever worked in an office which made sudden, sweeping changes, though, you know that things can be hectic and disorienting for a while. Old routines have to be abandoned and incorporated into new ones. Everything has to be double-checked just to be sure it's going in the right place, or to the right person. And the situation is compounded by the fact that I work alone.

When I first started here I went through an uncomfortable period where I just attempted to wing it, at best. It takes a long time to get into a decent routine, and it took even longer to adjust to not having anyone working alongside me. No bosses to point things out that I've overlooked, no co-workers to blame things on when something goes awry. My job isn't difficult by any stretch of the imagination, but I hadn't experienced anything like it before.

For our old lab, I just type up the information (donor's name, company's name and specimen ID number) and e-mail a list to my boss each night. For the new one I have to fax some stuff to the medical review officer listed on the form. This information wasn't given to me until yesterday, which meant Monday was interesting in that I had a whole box of specimens to send out, but had no idea what to do with the forms that belonged to those specimens.

When word finally came down that the system was in place to process the paperwork and all I had to do was fax it off, I went down through the stack of backlogged forms and got them all where they needed to go. My uncooperative fax machine took thirty minutes to manage this herculean feat, but the point is it was done.

As the forms were whisking away across the country I amused myself by wondering how long it would take before one of these new MROs would call with a complaint.

Didn't take long. I got my wish this morning. Very early this morning in fact; the message was on my machine when I got in at 7:50.

"This is Dr. Cranky from such-and-such office in some faraway state you've never heard of. I need a chain of custody form faxed immediately. Please call my office back at [phone number] immediately upon receiving this message."

I tend to my first-thing-in-the-morning collections, then gather up my stack of recently-faxed forms so the one Dr. Cranky wants is at hand immediately.

"Good morning. This is Richard, I just received a message about a COC that needs to be faxed."

"Please hold," says a voice that I've never heard before.

A few minutes go by. The hold music is "I'll Be Watching You" by Sting.

"Yes, Richard," says the voice from my message, "I received some results from a collection done at your office, but I never received the COC." She rattles off the ID number from the form. "This was collected on the 9th... just wondering why it's the 11th and I haven't gotten anything yet."

"My apologies. I only started taking collections for this lab on the 9th and I'm still adjusting to the new procedures. Can I have your fax number please?"

"It's on the form, in the top-right corner, where it says 'fax number'," says Dr. Cranky in the same annoying singsong voice you'd use to tell your kids it's time to pick up their toys.

"Right, I just want to confirm the number on the form is correct." After all, I faxed this out yesterday afternoon. I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt here; maybe the number on her form is misprinted. More likely she just didn't bother to check her fax tray this morning before calling me.

She tells me the fax number, one digit at a time. I tell her, "Alright, I'll dig that out and send it off to you right away."

"I'm sorry, 'dig that out'?" asks Dr. Cranky.

"Well yeah. I have a rather large stack of forms here, and it's going to take me a moment to find the one you want."

"Mmm-hmm. Richard, may I speak with your supervisor?"

"I suppose so. Do you have a pen handy?"

"Could you please transfer me to your supervisor, Richard?"

"No, I can't. I can give you her phone number though."

"I would like to speak to your supervisor immediately, Richard."

"I work alone in this office. To speak with anyone over my head you'll have to call corporate."

"What's the number, please?"

I tell it to her.

"Thank you Richard. Do you foresee future delays between the time a collection is taken and the time you send out the COC?"

"It's possible, but not likely. As I explained, I'm still adjusting to the new set of rules for the new lab."

"Thank you, have a nice day," she says, and hangs up.

It does amuse me that when Dr. Cranky goes to check her fax machine she'll be greeted with two copies of the same form. I bet she finds it and then calls my boss to complain anyway.

I'm wondering whether or not I should conveniently lose all of Dr. Cranky's forms from here on out. Hey, she thinks I'm incompetent anyway; I may as well act the part.