Off my game.

From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Saturday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted February 5, 2007.


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.

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