Job Seeker, Job Seeker, Let Down Your Hair
Posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
The party was good. Conversation flowed like the fine wine we quaffed, and I didn’t even need to mention yoga. I woke up with a matted tangle of hair on the back of my head rivaling the teasing in Olivia Newton-John’s mane after she went all bad-Sandy: “Tell me about it, stud.”
And my head still hurts, and it’s almost 5 pm. Which means, like I said, party was good.
Now I’m in the unfortunate position of trying to make myself do some work, when all I really want to do is go see New Moon and weep over the plight of muscle-bound werewolves in today’s society.
Instead, I will buckle down and proof some marketing documents. Let no one tell you my life is not one of nonstop glamour.
In other hair news, apparently companies have gone beyond making you pee in a jar to ensure sure you’re not a coke-addled transvestite before hiring you. Now they can test your golden tresses.
Newer workplace drug tests using hair samples reveal 10 times as many job applicants and employees taking cocaine and methamphetamine than had been found in urine tests.
Quest Diagnostics today will release hair data for the first time that show that in the first half of 2009 cocaine was found in three of every 1,000 urine tests performed on job applicants and employees, whereas hair testing found cocaine in 32 of 1,000. For every 1,000 tests, methamphetamine showed up once in urine and nine times in hair.
Hmph.
Personally, I’ve always found drug tests invasive and not really applicable to whether someone should be hired or not. If you can manage to get through the interview process without having to blow lines or smoke a doobie in the presence of HR, you’re probably okay for that middle-management job pushing papers, no? And who’s to say that a person doesn’t simply wait to turn down the temptingly dark corridor of illicit drug abuse until after they get hired?
At certain magazines where I may or may not have worked, in fact, drug users were considered the best employees around. Just a spoonful of sugar makes you work faster, sleep less, and be TOTALLY CRAZY PRODUCTIVE ALL THE TIME.
Until you set someone’s wastebasket on fire and flee the building screaming with no clothes on and then have to be checked into Bellevue for observation for the rest of the year. Fortunately, there’s workers comp. Not that I know that from experience or anything.
