On the Occasion of a Random Drug Test

(Rejected titles include: "Urine the Clear," "Pee for Two," and "Please Enjoy This Live Production of 'The Whiz'")

In the two years I've had this job, I've been "randomly" selected for a drug test four times (wait... those sarcastic quotes aren't doing the job.  Let me try harder to illegitimize this word a little...) "randomly" selected four times.

To me, that seems like a lot.  The answer I got got when I asked around work if this rate of testing was unusually frequent was, "For a white guy?  Yeah.  Kinda."

Observation:  I'm the only one in this waiting room who isn't wearing a reflective vest.

Of course, unusual stretches like this are typical in truly random systems. When your music device cues up three Elvis Costello songs in a row, it's easy to assume that it has some agenda, but in order to avoid that sort of conjunction, there would have to be some sort of anti-clustering algorithm.  I think I've read that iPods work on some pseudo-random principle like that.  But my Android and I coexist in a universe with fewer illusions.  One of us likes it that way.  The other is completely indifferent.

(It occurs to me that if I heard one of my employees say something like that, I might have that employee drug tested too.  This is all starting to make sense.)

It's as if my employers can tell how very ready I am, after forty-six years of being pharmaceutically straight as an arrow, to finally get high.  I think now would be a really great time to do it.  In fact, I think Nancy Reagan could have had a much greater reach if her tag line was "Just say 'no'... for a while.  Or, "Just say not yet".  Or, "Just say, I'm going to be a middle-aged person someday, with no neurological development ahead of me and, when I'm sufficiently bored with this one perspective of reality, I promise you that I'm gonna bake like a pan of muffins.'"

Observation:  There are two guys here talking about hookers.

There are a couple of odd moments in this process, one being that you have to empty the contents of your pockets into a lock box, which gets weird if you are ever, for whatever reason, carrying small plastic dinosaur.

And then, if the toilet has a tank, it will be sealed shut with police tape, so there's part of your brain that thinks you're about to pee all over a crime scene.

And then, if you're like me, you can never remember, once you're standing there and holding a plastic cup of your own urine, if the tech told you to leave the cup in there or bring it out with you, or if that bit of decorum was even discussed -- because it's obvious to everyone but you that one of those options is so much more obviously polite than the other.

And then you have to stand there and watch another human being handle your specimen, pour some out, repackage it, take the temperature... I always have an urge to apologize.

Observation:  There's almost always one guy pacing around the waiting room with his hands on his hips exhaling noisily through his mouth -- as if the sample he's been asked to provide is actually a gallon of diarrhea.

At the doctor's office, they sometimes ask for a mid-stream sample -- the implication being that there is some impurity inherent to the (excuse this colloquialism) business end of the urethra that a) would contaminate the specimen and b) I don't want to think about.  So, I'll sometimes ask if the specimen needs to, or is preferred to be, mid-stream.  They never, ever care.

I once made the mistake of lowering my voice and asking that if I provided a mid-stream sample, would there be any "extra credit".  And it took a minute or so to clarify that I was making a joke and not offering what must be the world's least appealing bribe.

They would do well to lighten up a little.  If a bomb goes off while we're all tucked away in this oddly well-fortified security area, society might break down to having only two factions: people with and people without reflective vests.  I would be a key ambassador in this world, one foot in either camp, sympathetic to the test subjects and a guy who understands a thing or two about the variations of urine collection.


I might be this new world's most valuable asset, because most of the guys who think of things like this are almost always totally high.