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 June 26, 2006.
…why?
It’s about 5:03 p.m. I’m in the back room stacking boxes of collection kits, waiting for my girlfriend to show up and give me a ride home. I hear the doorknob jiggle. Then it jiggles a little louder. Then a loud knocking. Then the sound of a foot hitting the door.
I go out to investigate.
“Hey, let’s try not to break the door, okay?”
“My bad, but it wasn’t openin’.”
“It was locked. It’s after five.”
“What, you all closed?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you closed?”
“What do you mean why am I closed? It’s after five. I’m closed.”
“I’m here for a drug test.”
“I can see that, but I’m closed. I’ll be open tomorrow at eight.”
“Why I can’t get one now?”
“Because I’m closed. It’s after five. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
“Man, ain’t that some [explitive deleted].”
I’m trying to envision a door somewhere, perhaps leading into a restaurant or a bank or some other business, that only opens after you kick it. I can’t imagine for the life of me what this man was thinking. Maybe the door is just really, really stuck!
This isnt the real story about what happened this week at the pee clinic… but I’m in a really foul mood and felt it was better to use this crappy story to vent, rather than ruin a good one with a bunch of ranty nonsense. See you tomorrow.
Like everyone else on the internet, I once teamed up with an artist to make a webcomic. It didn’t get very far, but I’ll share one here each Friday until there aren’t anymore. Enjoy.
So we get eight more weeks of Throwback this December. I believe the technical term for this development is “groovy”. I know about this comeback because my buddy sent me a text message at 8:14 this morning telling me as much, waking me up at least fifteen minutes before my alarm was set to go off. Which, as you can imagine, left me with mixed feelings. One one hand, yay Throwback! On the other, man I am totally going to slash that dude’s tires because what was he thinking messaging me at the holy asscrack of dawn?
If Peanut says it’s okay I’ll be picking up Scribblenauts and Professor Layton this weekend, adding two more games to the pretty decent pile I’ve already got stacked up here. I haven’t even touched Dark Spire outside of my first two play sessions, and the final chapter of FF4:TAY is sitting on my Wii virtually unplayed. I’m starting to get back into that old familiar rut of “too many great games, not enough time to go around” which, as problems go, is a pretty damned good one to have. I think I’ll keep it.
Stuff!
– My good buddy Dan has started up a new blog. My best guess is thatit’s going to be primarily of the “ridiculous nonsense” variety, which is more or less my favorite type of blog. I think he’s going to take a crack at daily updates, and I hope he’s at least as successful at it as I have been. (And keep in mind I’m defining “success” here as “updates every day”, not necessarily “updates with something meaningful every day”.)
– I heard yet another story about my future schedule at this new job. It’s crazy that I’m having such a hard time finding a few hours of free time to make a vlog. During the week is right out because of the 9-to-5 schedule I’m working. Saturdays are bad because Friday nights are D&D nights, which mean I typically drop exhausted into bed about 6am Saturday morning and don’t wake up until very late in the afternoon. Sundays are bad because that’s the one day Peanut and I have off together. Saturday evenings might be a good candidate but that’s currently when I’m getting a large portion of my vidja gaming done. I really need a day of the week where I can wake up in the morning and have the house to myself for at least a couple hours, free from distraction or prior engagements. I’ve, ah, complained and ranted about this topic enough I think. I’ll shut up about it now.
– Survivor: Samoa starts on Thursday, which means I’ll be offering the play-by-play here. If you love Survivor this news probably pleases you (and don’t forget to check out all the Survivor: Tocantins posts in the archives). If you hate Survivor, well, neener neener etc. If you’ve never watched it, maybe set your DVR this week and see if it’s your thing. I typically can’t stand reality TV but Survivor has such a strong sense of game-ness to it that I find it irresistable.
– Here’s a picture of some cute genie girl walking through a goblin-infested forest:
 This is, of course, a screenshot from the new Shantae game coming out on DSi. Which means, uh, I have to now get a DSi. Heh heh.
I bought the original Shantae after about eight seconds of prodding from a friend of mine. I don’t believe I needed any convincing beyond “half-naked genie girl whips bad guys with her purple hair”. The game is a bit rough around the edges, but not in that bad, unplayable way that turns you off a game. It’s more in that quirky, labor-of-love way like Mega Man 2 or Cave Story. I did my part to raise Shantae awareness by doing a way-too-long Let’s Play of it over on the YouTubes (warning: 59 parts!), and I’m expecting to get a lot of “did u here about the dsi sequel for dsi??” comments in the upcoming weeks.
Of course, I can’t actually afford a DSi anytime in the near future; I’m putting it at the top of my Christmas list. Along with a really good electric shaver. Which brings me to my last point:
– I really really can’t stand shaving. It is the worst thing ever. The only thing worse is the terrible sensation of having stubble on my face. Hey, stubble: either grow or don’t grow. Make up your damn mind!
Here’s a frequent-ish occurence: I’ll be laying in bed trying to fall asleep when an extraordinarily vivid almost perfectly-formed character will just suddenly pop into existence and then not leave. Sometimes I’ll get up and try to expunge the interloper with some slipshod writing. Sometimes I just toss and turn until I drift off into a fitful sleep complete with dreams about me and this weird new character fighting crime (or whatever).
Sometimes I spend five years working on an RPGMaker game. That happened once.
Since I’m not disciplined enough to actually get a complete story down on paper and I’m easily distracted by shiny objects (no kidding, I’ve already abandoned this blog post three times for diversions in other windows) I usually end up forgetting about… whatever it was.
Not this new character, though. She’s more… pervasive than the usual ones. I imagine this is due to the setting she exists in: a Prohibition-era analogue of Chicago or Detroit. Thanks to this wedding thing we’ve committed to my beloved Peanut has been bombarding me with all manner of 1920s imagery on a daily basis, giving me a constant backdrop to imagine the nagging idea in my head against.
So I’m going to introduce you to this character who is haunting my subconsious and tell you what I know about her. As I see it, this can end one of two ways: 1) you guys point out that the character is stupid and not worth developing, helping me let her go back to the mists of my subconscious, or 2) you guys like the character and end up pleading for further development, only to be pointedly disappointed when I completely fail to ever do so (see aformentioned discipline problem).
Here goes:
– Her name is Jocelyn Beauregard, and she is a private eye. She has short blonde hair and wears a trench coat and a cloche hat.
– Her most defining character trait is an almost crippling case of tunnel vision. She is the embodiment of “can’t see the forest for the trees”. She has the ability to fixate, perhaps even obsess, over tiny details regular mortals miss, but is almost hopelessly inept at putting it all together. She uses this in her work to help her solve the cases no one else can solve, but needs some gentle nudging from someone with some basic common sense to translate her list of clues into an “aha!”
– The aformentioned tunnel vision causes her social life to be an absolute train wreck, as can be expected.
– At any time she has taken up some completely random hobby which she devotes endless amounts of her free time to, only to completely abandon the moment some new whimsy strikes her. Her office is littered with half-written manuscripts, hastily-assembled model airplanes, unfinished scarves and a dust-covered ukulele.
– She cares for a mangy grey tomcat named Pads who has a chewed ear and a sour disposition. By all accounts the cat is a vicious monster with considerable malice for the city and its inhabitants, includying Jocelyn, who is oblivious to the evil thing and has nothing but affection for it.
– Her parents are never mentioned, but she had an eccentric great-uncle who vanished in the jungles of Africa leaving her a fortune (which she can’t touch for some beaurocratic red-tapey reason, hence the detective gig) and a childhood’s worth of poignant witticisms to fall back on in hard times.
– Her best friend and quasi-partner is a grizzled, streetsmart Irish cabbie who is unnamed because the only Irish names I can think of are hackneyed stereotypes. He looks after Jocelyn if she gets into too much trouble and shuttles her around the city in return for her having gotten him out of a pretty serious jam at some point in the past.
– The cases Jocelyn takes on tend to be unusual, but this isn’t really worth noting because mystery stories aren’t any fun if they aren’t at least a little unusual.
I think that about covers it. That was fun, maybe we’ll do it again in a couple months when some other idea sets up shop in my silly head and refuses to heed the eviction notice.
In RPGs, when one character attacks another, the amount of damage dealt is represented by a number. In the long and storied history of the genre this has meant everything from carefully-calculated two-digit hits to streams of nines flying by faster than the human eye can keep up.
What I want to know is this: should we consider “damage” to be standard across the table? As an example, Ryu from the original Breath of Fire has a cap of 999 damage even with his strongest attack. Is he really ten times weaker than Cecil, who can hit for a theoretical max of 9999? And is Cecil in turn fifteen times weaker than Squall, who can hit his cap that many times with his limit break? And of course that pales in comparison to what Wakka can do with a five-digit cap and a rubber game ball…
But what if the damage scales aren’t equal? What if, say, one point of damage from Breath of Fire is worth more than a point of damage from Final Fantasy 4? It’s entirely possible that Ryu’s single attack is as strong or stronger than Cecil’s despite Cecil having access to a greater amount of nines.
And of course there is the question of just what heroes are capable of doing if their limits were revoked. Characters in FF10 rub up against a limit of 9999 until they attach Break Damage Limit to their weapons, whereupon they will magically begin doing 12000 or so. It’s probably fair to say they were dealing 12000 all along, and the stupid game was just not reflecting that with its bouncing numbers. Maybe Ryu’s dragon forms could connect for tens of thousands of damage if not for that pesky line of code that reads “if dmg>999 then dmg=999”.
The question inevitably comes back around to multi-hit attacks. Why can’t Cecil hit more than once per round? For that matter, why can’t his friend Edge, who is carrying a sword in each hand? Do each of Edge’s weapons labor under a damage cap of 4500? Are we to believe each of his arms are half as strong as Cecil’s?
This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up nights. Like… tonight, for example.
Actually it’s been carefully constructed to ensure that I won’t. So let’s talk about that a bit.
The peemeister gig was pretty good from a content standpoint, since it was a kind of quirky job virtually everyone loathes but virtually no one knows anything about. As an added bonus my bosses were actually cool with me sharing my experiences on the Internet, as long as I never reveal the company name. Which I never did.
This new job, though, is mainly phone work, so any experience worth blogging about is going to boil down to something like “this caller was rude and/or clueless and/or ignorant! let us laugh at him/her/it!” I think we’re probably full up on those already, but I can think of at least two more good reasons to not kick-start the ol’ work blog again.
First, I’ve been informed that our company is one of two or three who provide this particular service, which means it would be a lot easier for Internet sleuths to pinpoint my place of business and a lot easier for my bosses to discover the blog (if, say, they systematically do Google searches for “our service here”). These new bosses are probably not cool with the idea of one of their employees griping to an online audience, and is probably best avoided.
Second, the phone work is going to come to an end after my training schedule is up, after which I’ll be working nights busying myself with menial office tasks. There’s just no material there.
Speaking of which, I was supposed to have finished up my training last week, but have been informed that it might have been extended three or four more weeks. This makes no sense to me; why hire a new employee and spend over a month training him on a job he’s not going to be doing anyway? Anyway, it means I’m stuck on this 9-to-5 schedule longer than I anticipated, so I’m rethinking this vlog haitus thing. I figured that would give me a week or two to settle into my new routine, but now that I’m hearing my new routine is maybe another month off I kind of don’t want to leave it sitting on the shelf that long. I’m just… not sure what I want to do with it yet.
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 May 25, 2006.
Long stretches of time.
The truth of the matter is that the vast, vast majority of my time here at the office is empty. On a typical day that means less than an hour of actual work. As a result, there are sometimes long stretches of time in which nothing particularly interesting happens, leaving me nothing particularly interesting to write about.
But I mean, come one, how am I supposed to follow up that story from a month ago?
Still, a month without an update is pretty lame even for me. So rather than just leaving this space empty for another month (or until something neat happens, or the world ends, whichever comes first) I figured I’d regale you with a few minor tidbits that didn’t really merit updates of their own.
About two weeks ago a man came in for a drug test. His name was Kareem Abdul Jabbar Jackson. I immediately decided that it was the most amazing name I had ever heard in my entire life.
On the subject of donor names… earlier this week I had an exceptionally slow day: only six collections. Four of those were for guys named Christopher. One was for a woman named Christine. The sixth was for a man named Cristobal. I think the six of them should get together and form a crime-fighting group called “The Super Chrises”.
I actually did almost update a while ago, but now I’m glad I didn’t. See, I was having one of those remarkably awful days, where everything set me off. A world-class bad mood, you might say. After a verbal boxing match over the phone with my bank I realized I had only five minutes left on my lunch break, so I hopped on my bike and flew down to McDonald’s to buy some grub. I get back a few minutes after 2:00 and there are a couple people waiting for me. Cursing under my breath I set my food aside and took care of the collections.
What I almost updated about was this pompous holier-than-thou over-educated nitwit who took one look at my sack’o’burgers, scoffed, and then said “You really shouldn’t eat that, you know.”
For some reason I was so irritated at this guy’s comment that I sat down and wrote a five-paragraph post about him, and about how I should be allowed to eat whatever I want, fast food or no, and who are you to comment? I had it all worked out, lambasting the whole uber-vegan subculture who look down their long, sickly noses at the unwashed masses who eat fast food.
Then, just to be sure I was a complete hypocrite, I went on to detail my actual eating habits, which include cooking a meal every night of the week and having fast food once in a while as an afterthought. I went on to contradict my previous paragraph, proceeding to bash people who did eat fast food on a regular basis and how unhealthy and unfulfilling a lifestyle choice that is.
As it turns out though, simply the act of typing all that out was enough to vent my frustrations. I went on to preview it and realized that nobody, anywhere, wants to read about my McDonald’s misadventures, so I deleted the post. Dodged a bullet, there! Whew!
The lightswitch in my hallway is broken, and has somehow caused all the wiring in the two fluorescent lights it controls to melt and fuse to the bulbs. Thus the entire back half of my office was plunged into darkness. I told my boss to fix it; he bought me a lamp to stick in the hallway. Oh well.
I received my first formal complaint in over two years! One of our landscaping clients filed a complaint that I am “unnecessarily rude to our Hispanic employees”. This is presumably because I refuse to drug test them without a translator… although they didn’t mention that part.
It isn’t going to happen, but I personally hope that we lose the client. We can’t really provide the service they’re asking for anyway; they hire an almost exclusively Mexican crew, and really need a drug test site that speaks Spanish. Why they don’t simply shop around until they find one is beyond me. At the very least, why put up with someone who is “unnecessarily rude” to their employees?
So there it is, a couple half-interesting little tidbits all rolled into one. Hopefully something sufficiently post-worthy happens in the near future so I don’t have to pull this trick twice in a row!
Last time someone was in to play with my lights, he poked it with a broom a few times and then gave up. Gee, I wonder why they don’t work…
Like everyone else on the internet, I once teamed up with an artist to make a webcomic. It didn’t get very far, but I’ll share one here each Friday until there aren’t anymore. Enjoy.
After playing Beatles Rock Band on guitar for a few hours with some buddies I managed to get one of those fancy silver icons. I should be happy about this, but I’m not, because it just serves to remind me of the stupid regular ugly black icon I still have in Rock Band 2.
It’s not for lack of trying. I had a plan one night to go through and get the Bladder of Steel achievement. I signed in on expert vocals. I knew how much time I’d have between songs in case I needed to pee or refresh my drink, and I knew which songs had long percussion parts I could safely be absent for. I can’t do well on expert vocals — I was three-starring a lot of songs — but after five hours of singing the end (and my silver icon) was in sight.
Then Rob the Prez-O-Dent came on. This song is impossible to sing. I failed out, and all my hopes and dreams were crushed. No, seriously, this is not music. I don’t know what it is. It’s like the Xbox is having a siezure.
Anyway, I’ll probably clear Beatles again this weekend, on vocals this time. The most jarring difference between this and Rock Band 2 is that the visuals are actually interesting; I’ve missed more than a couple notes because I was watching the background instead of my note chart.
I’m still wary about the long-term playability of this game, but I am enjoying it a great deal. I’m not crazy about having to purchase exclusive DLC for it, so maybe I won’t. Take that, capitalism!
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