The Drug Test from HELL!

Today, I had to shove off my contract job for the afternoon to go to Edina and take a drug test.

Yeah. That's what I thought too.

I knew this was coming. The agency I'm contracted with told me two weeks ago, but they didn't get around to sending my forms until today. Which is funny, because last week I think I might have wanted to subconsciously fail it as I had poppyseed bagels for lunch every day. But alas the drug test was today.

Now, I haven't taken a drug test for a job in like 20 years. I mean I was employed at my last job for the prior 14 years, so it's been a while. At lunch, I made sure I drank two large glasses of unsweetened ice-tea, then I topped that off with an iced vanilla latte grande from Caribou.

Coffee makes me piss like a racehorse, as my dad puts it. Though, to this day I have never put the logic together about why racehorses in particular, pee more than regular horses. But I like the colloquialism.

Okay. Now the freakishly embarrassing revelation. So I had two large ice teas and one grande iced coffee and I'm standing in that bathroom at the drug testing place and can't get a damn drop out.

Yes. I CANNOT pee on command.

And I definitely CANNOT pee in a room where directly outside it a sixty-some year old lady waits, tapping her pencil...loudly, asking me every so often if I am finished or not.

OF COURSE I'M NOT FINISHED!!! DON'T YOU THINK I WOULD HAVE COME OUT IF I HAD FINISHED?!!

Okay, so it was a bit of hyperbole. I managed to fill the cup to the specified line.

Whew!

So I zip up and bring my cup outside, where the old lady poured it into a small plastic beaker and then held it up and looked at it as if she were at a wine tasting.

“This just won't do,” she said. “It has to be past the line.”

“Past the line?” I ask. “I thought you said to the line?”

“Past the line,” she says and promptly dumped my hard work into the toilet and flushed it away. “You'll have to try again.”

WHAT?! ARE YOU F!@#ING KIDDING ME?!!

Panic. Embarassment. Humiliation. All of it swirled around me as I looked at the clock. I had 40 minutes to get back home to pick up the kids from school, so that gave me 10 minutes to man up and fill a cup.

So I sat in the lobby and downed four cups of water and paced. I jumped in place. I sat down and stood up over and over again. Sat down. Tried those lemaze breathing techniques. Stared at a watercolor painting. Visualized a full cup. Waterfalls. Raindrops. Babbling brooks. Rushing rivers. Monsoons. Hurricanes. Deluges.

BINGO! I NEED A CUP HERE!!! PRONTO!

Thirty seconds later, I obliterated the line. I had excess and had to let it go to waste in the toilet. I felt like yelling to the old lady outside the door, “Hey, you have any empty 5 gallon buckets you need filled?! Barrels? Brewery vats?”

Relieved, I quickly finished the necessary paperwork and walked out of the office. I was standing at the elevators, when I first felt it. The second iced tea was dropping. So before entering the elevator I head around the corner to the bathroom.

When I don't need it, now it flows like the Ganges.

I ride the elevator down and get in the car. The wife has waited longer than she anticipated (Thank you). On the way home, we're joking about my urination inadequacies. Now, the trip from Edina to Chaska is what 15-20 miles tops. So about the time we're getting off the crosstown and onto 212. The iced grande vanilla latte drops.

No problem. It's another 10 miles or so. I got this in the bag.

It was about at Eden Prairie when the four large cups of water I drank in the doctor's office dropped.

I actually heard the rush of liquid into my bladder like an old coffee pot.

For seven excruciating miles, mind you during rush hour traffic now, I bit my lip, gripped the arm rest and stared longingly at the sweet, sweet empty Vitamin Water bottle at my feet. Oh, heavenly bottle, I need you - NOW. But we were at the stoplight at the top of the Chestnut Street exit, completely surrounded by cars.

In the driver's seat, my dear wife held back explosive laughter, the kind that is so violently hilarious that it takes all her will power to hold it in.

I get it. I'd do the same thing. At least she's not saying, “Waterfalls, raindrops, deluges.” DAMMIT. I just said it to myself.

I closed my eyes and tried not to imagine my downstairs parts actually exploding from the pressure, leaving cartoonish, blackened explosion burns where my genitalia used to be.

I had my seat belt off and my hand on the door handle 25 yards from the driveway, and before the wife put the car in park, I was downstairs in the bathroom at the beginning of literal 2 minute torrent.

HALLELUJAH! HALLELUJAH-HALLELUJAH! HA-LLE-LU-JAH!

Oh and later, after a bike ride with the girls. We got in a water fight with the hose. What fun!