I meant to post this last week on the private mailing list because my new job was still unofficial, but now that everyone at my current job knows I can go ahead and post it here.

It has been a few years since my last pre-employment drug screening and I don't remember the protocol being as involved.

I was walked back to the lab by the technician and told to wash my hands in the sink, but not to use soap, and then dry my hands completely with a paper towel.

I was then led to the other side of the lab and the technician opened up a cupboard on the wall that must have had 100 sealed specimen containers. She told me to pick one.

The specimen container was sealed with tin foil across the top kind of like how the orange juice containers are at McDonalds. She instructed me to remove the tin foil cover and throw the cover into the trash, and then to dump out the contents of the container onto the counter but not to touch them, and then place the container on the counter.

The container had a bag and another smaller plastic vial inside.

She drew a little mark on the side of the container and said I had to fill it at least to that mark (it was a urine test). The reason is that there was a little thermometer strip on the outside of the cup and the liquid had to at least cover that to get a temperature.

She walked me to a restroom that had the hot and cold water handles removed and yards and yards of tape were wrapped around the handle stubs as well as the faucet. She told me not to flush the toilet when I was done, and then to just walk back to the lab.

Once back at the lab she told me to set my specimen on the counter. She had me sign and date a sticker that had a number on it that matched a number printed at the top of the page with my name on it. She told me verify that the two numbers were the same.

She then picked up my sample and poured it into the smaller plastic vial that I had dumped out on the counter before.

As she was doing this she was narrating exactly what she was doing. "I am now putting a cap on this vial. Now I am placing the seal that you signed onto the vial as proof that this is your sample. Etc. etc."

She then had me watch as she placed the plastic vial into the bag that I also dumped out on the counter. She peeled off the wax paper strip that was covering the sticky strip and sealed the bag, and then placed another sticker on the outside of the bag from the same sheet that I signed that had the serial number printed on it. She talked me through that part too.

That was it. It just took me by surprise a little bit about all of the formality the process required.