An open letter.

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!