[BITList] To pee or not to Pee!

[HUGH]

Frank,

I haven't managed to find out if it's mandatory in the UK, and I hope it's not. I do get the impression, from what I see on line, that a parasitical industry has grown up offering a drug vetting service to employers.  I don't know anyone in employment who has been tested.  It could be on a par with the situation whereby someone must go through a "disclosure" procedure now, to be allowed near a child (the child not being one's own) other than in all but an accidental situation (maybe even then, for all I know !).  The other day I attended a "workshop" in town, set up to gather public opinion on what should be the nature of a proposed statue to sit in front of the Town's Buildings.  The one they put up in neighbouring Greenock is a horse, and it's supposed (true) to signify the town's shipbuilding past, horses having been used to pull carts to and from the yards.  This was met with incredulity, notwithstanding it's a beautiful statue, hence the introduction of consultations for Port Glasgow.  It looks like we will get the skeletal bow of a ship with stainless steel bow wave.  But I digress.  As seems to be the norm nowadays, local school children were roped in to provide ideas - based, one assumes, on their memories of shipbuilding - and to get into the place I had to go through a room full of schoolchildren and their shepherds. I was escorted through it to a back room where, behind a shut door with the other unvetted adults, I took part in a discussion.  What shit, and the notion of general workplace drug testing comes from the same stable. I was once told I had to attend a meeting with "the company doctor" over some dispute about time off for illness.  Some rule was quoted to me. So I attended.  "Are you a doctor?" I asked him when we were seated facing each other on the firm's premises.  He said he was.  "Are you the company doctor?" I asked. He said he wasn't (the company didn't have a doctor, as I well knew).  "Why am I here?" I asked him.  He didn't know, and I didn't know. So I left.  That sort of thing - self-certification had just been introduced - was the start of the intrusion of employment law into private life.  Did we but know it, Elfin Bloody Safety was on the horizon.  Well-meaning ideas turned into self-perpetuating authoritarian industries.

Hugh.
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