Cubical Embarrasment

A few weeks ago, I received a voicemail with the following message (names have been changed to conceal identity, well, all except for mine, but anyway):

"Hi Bret, it's Yolanda. I need to setup an appointment to get your blood. I can do it at your work, your house, wherever is convenient. Have a nice day!"

Now I sat and tried to figure out for the life of me why some woman would call and want my blood. The whole thing was just odd. You would expect something more like, "Hey Bret, it's Yolanda from the 'Indiana Blood Center and Vampires Guild' and we need some of your blood for some noble cause blah blah blah." But this message had none of that. This sounded more like a producer from Maury Povitch trying to con me into a paternity test or something. But then again, very few engineers or engineering students have been featured on Maury's show, given the almost zero likelihood that they managed to find a girl to even take to Wendy's, let alone back to "the teleporter" or whatever other Star Trek themed room was featured in their apartment.

Anyway, I digress. I called Yolanda back and made an appointment for her to meet me at work. In the mean time, she still gave no indication of her intentions with my blood, but I figured out that I recently applied for some additional insurance at work which (apparently) requires a blood test. No sweat.

So Yolanda arrived at my office yesterday with medical bag in tow. I escorted her into the building and asked where we should make the transaction. "Anyplace with a flat surface where nobody will be freaked out by me drawing blood." In an engineering facility, such an event is likely to draw a crowd, but only in an effort to see who can make the blood come out faster or who can design a machine that checks the blood for malaria on the spot or some such. So I told her we could do it at my lab bench.

Now the area around my lab is almost completely vacated. I'm about three days from switching cubes and labs, and I'm pretty much the last man standing in our area, so it's pretty empty. Yolanda dropped her medical bag, pulled out a scale, a tape measure, and a whole pile of blood drawin' gear. This was already a little more intense than I expected, but alas.

She took my weight and height (inseam is still less than waist...sigh) and then told me to roll up my sleeve. All is well. Nobody is around. She takes the blood, and I begin to help her gather up her things. Just as she caps the last vile of blood, I see, in slow motion, her reach into her medical bag and pull out a small plastic cup. Simultaneously out of my other eye, I see one of my coworkers round the corner just in time to hear Yolanda say:

"Okay Mr. Hawkins. You fill 'er up and bring it back to me."

Coworker halts. "Uh, I'm obviously interrupting something here."

Now first off, when handed an empty cup to fill, it took me a second to remember that this was not one of the fertility doctor appointments of the past few years. Talk about an embarrasing scenario. Next I explain, politely, to Yolanda that I can't very well walk half way across our floor with a cup of my own urine in hand. (Although this isn't something that seems COMPLETELY out of the realm of possibility in our building.) She didn't even have a lid for the cup! So I convinced her to wait outside the Men's Room, which she did.

After I left her the, uh, goods, I escorted her out of the building. After an awkward handshake (followed by a good, solid up-to-the-elbows scrub for yours truly) I trudged back to my lab to find and apologize to my coworker. He took it in stride, although I'm not sure he bought my "it's for insurance" routine. Ah well...