I won’t use this as a platform. I won’t take this opportunity to bemoan the bogus playing field marijuana and heroine share when it comes to drug testing. But I will share with you my recent experience, one of the byproducts of which I’m enjoying as I type. Ten points if you can guess what it is before these 728 words are up.
Several mornings ago I had one of the most odd experiences of my adult life; I had to go get drug tested and finger printed. It was very… unique? Where to start? Chronologically I suppose. The drug testing was hilarious, Beckett himself could not have engineered something so ridiculous. A room packed with people – government people – in suits. Men and women and pin drop silence. And me. Government people aren’t your normal breed of human; they’re a more awkward, slovenly, unkempt, disheveled bunch. Needless to say, Ben Sherman and I stuck out like sore thumbs in a sea of baggy cuffs and matted hair.
The mood was awkward and embarrassed, because unlike in a regular doctor’s office, there’s no anonymity to protect you from why you are there. Everyone knows; you’re there to pee in a cup. So there’s this odd tension, with people getting up and returning sipping from styrofoam cups of water. I sat there for almost 30 minutes before a nurse finally came out and in a room full of adults asked, “anyone ready yet?”
Not a word. She says “Fine.” and walks out. That’s when it occurs to me that these people aren’t waiting inline to be tested, they’re just pee shy. Which is stupid. But then again, so is this entire situation. So I get up and ask if I can “pee in the cup”. By the way, you can completely use someone else’s pee, they don’t check and there’s no real control in place to even scare you into quality assurance. This measure was literally as effective as random bag checking on the subway. Oh right, spoiler alert, I pee’d in a cup. And I’m clean.
Now off to finger printing – another adventure. The finger printing office is located above the Farragut West metro, in a nasty, nasty concrete building, the kind that looks like the corners are made of charcoal. And, par for the course, there’s some Pentecostal reggae man singing outside. If only he’d be stationed outside the drug testing facility…
So I enter the building, graffiti in the elevator reads MS 13 (nice) with more graffiti in Spanish beneath it saying “no mas violencia”. As I enter the suite this short, tiny Filipino woman greets me. The Finger Printer. Dressed in all black, with fire truck lipstick, and a bra that makes her boobs look like they are sitting on top of even bigger boobs, I’m escorted down a hallway with wallpaper curling at the tops. Enter her office, which looks like Vietnam. Plants lining the wall and various stone idols mixed in there for… good measure? We sit down at opposite sides of her desk, and she just stares at me. Smiling. She then offers me tea. So her and I have a cup of tea, in her office, which must be ridiculously expensive since its 4th floor bay window overlooks Farragut Square. I ask her how she got into fingerprinting, because honestly, how the hell do you get into finger printing? It’s an excellent niche market to corner in Washington, DC. She pours me another cup of tea (green tea with roasted brown rice – delicious) and says, ”My late husband… he work for the CIA and get me this job”. Oh my god. I can only imagine what black ops shit goes down in the Philippines. Spooky baby, spooky. With those being the only words she’s said to me thus far, she finger prints me. There’s a technique involved that I won’t get into, because it’s a technique for finger printing, but suffice it to say it’s much more messy and involved than I would ever have thought. Like changing a diaper. All done, I head for the door. As I’m about to leave she says, “Hey, wait one minute!” and reaches into her drawer, and pulls out a handful of tea packets, giving me several. With gifts in hand, I peace’d. And all this before 10:00 AM.
The end.
