The lockbox.

From 2005 to 2008 I maintained a blog about my experiences working in the drug test industry. Every Sunday I revive one of those experiences here. The following was originally posted February 14, 2006.


The lockbox.

Some people decry drug testing as being invasive, and perhaps to some extent it is. I don’t personally agree (after all, we’re dealing with bodily waste here… what were you going to do with it, anyway?), although I do concede that the collection process itself can be irritating and even humiliating. The part I believe is most invasive, however, is where I ask you to empty your pockets.

The reason for this is obvious, of course: we don’t want anyone to sneak something into the bathroom with which to adulterate the sample. Nor do we want anyone to sneak in a sample that isn’t theirs. As it turns out, though, nobody likes to be separated from their belongings for any length of time. Most people simply drop their stuff in a little pile on my counter and do their business. A few guys go through the whole “this too?” routine, as though their wallet or their cell phone or their car keys are somehow exempt from the policy.

Some guys don’t want to empty their pockets at all, or adamantly refuse to leave one or more of their belongings behind. For these guys, I have the lockbox. This is a small white box that will hold pretty much anything the average man can carry, and then some. The box hangs over the top of the door, so it’s inside the bathroom with the donor. The key stays outside the room, with me. Thus the donor is sure I’m not stealing his credit cards, and I’m confident he’s not hiding anything in his sample.

The pocket-emptying ritual is mainly a detterent, in my experience. I’m not allowed to do pat downs or strip searches, so it’s still relatively simple to hide just about anything you like anywhere on your person, just so long as I can’t see it. Still, you’d be surprised the kinds of things people pull out of their pockets: everything from hidden samples to little sealed packets of liquid or powder. Sometimes they sheepishly slide from their pockets to my garbage can so I don’t see what they’re throwing away. Sometimes they tell me they want to run out to their car, and I watch as they open the door, drop something on the seat, and then come back inside. Sometimes they just don’t come back.

I know it’s nothing personal, but I admit I feel offended when guys treat me like a thief. A relatively common occurence is for the guy to slip all the cash out of his billfold and count it in front of me. This is especially humorous when the gentleman in question isn’t particularly wealthy; don’t worry fella, your seven dollars is safe with me. The curious thing about the money-count is that there is usually very little follow-up. After the collection is done, the money is usually stuffed back into its pocket without even so much as a glance to verify that it is, in fact, the same amount.

Only once have I been actually accused of stealing someone’s belongings: cash in the amount of five dollars. This from a donor whose on-site test came back flagged for both marijuana and cocaine. He swore to have me fired.

You’ll notice that I’ve been referring only to men, up until this point. This is because women always have purses, and purses don’t fit into the lockbox. I imagine with some heavy-duty shoving I could squeeze a small-ish purse inside, but most ladies carry these enormous planet-sized bags that would take at least two lockboxes to accomodate. Thus, when a woman doesn’t want to leave her things behind her only course of action is to lock them in her car and then return. I recall one case in which a woman did exactly this, and then was dismayed when I asked that she leave her car keys on the counter, as though I could drive off with her SUV in the 30 seconds her back was turned.

Sometimes even the lockbox isn’t enough, however. If there is a point of the collection the donor will object to, endlessly, it’s the lockbox. I have formed the opinion that these are men who seek some loophole in the collection process they can exploit later on, though I don’t have any real way to test this hypothesis (only a small fraction of the collections I do require on-site tests… not enough of a sample to really correlate anything with the results I see). Some men get to the pockets portion of the collection, and even after the lockbox has been offered can still find no compromise. Some end up getting angry and leaving altogether, drug test be damned.

So yeah, I understand the mentality. People simply do not like to be separated from their stuff, most of all the woman who came tearing out of the bathroom with her pants only pulled halfway up because she heard her cell phone ringing on my counter. In the universal list of priorities, “keeping your junk hidden from view of total strangers” apparently ranks below “telling Trisha I’ll call her back in like ten minutes”.

The largest amount of cash someone has ever left on my counter is $1200, in $100 and $20 bills. The gentleman counted it out before he went in, but not after he came out. That could have been a pretty big payday, I suppose.

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