Part of receiving a job offer from my soon-to-be employer, which I'll dub Local Teaching Hospital/University, is that the prospective employee must take a drug test within 48 hours of the job offer. That means that I had from yesterday through Friday to get the test done.

The HR department provided me with a list of the closest labs to my home ZIP code. The closest one of all is at Broad and Tasker Streets in South Philly. There's a subway stop literally right there; one of the subway exits is only a few feet from the lab's front door. SEPTA's looming labor dispute has been put on hold; the union and SEPTA agreed to a 60-day extension of their current contract. So the strike that might have begun at midnight tonight will now be postponed, at worst, and avoided entirely, at best.

This afternoon, I walked to the nearest subway station to here, which is about 6 long blocks away, and took the subway to the lab on Broad Street. Within a few minutes, all was taken care of, and I am now one step closer to being a full-time employee again. :o)

My next step will take place on Monday, when I have the pre-hire medical exam scheduled. Since I have no idea where my immunization records are, at the moment, this is going to involve my giving them some blood so they can test to be sure I'm vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox. It's also required for me to take a TB test, as it is for all employees of the health care system. Fine. All that good stuff happens on Monday morning.

Then I'll walk over to the store that's about a mile from where I'm getting the exam, the one that's about a block from the HR office. I have to purchase scrubs, which is the uniform for everyone who works on this site. Heck, that's BEYOND being fine by me. I went to parochial school and wore a uniform for 12 years, and believe me, I MISS it. It made my life SO much easier to just sleepwalk over to the closet and haul out a uniform -- no decision-making required. Once I went to college and into the workforce, and all of a sudden I had to actually be functional enough in the morning to choose something that was appropriate to wear, I sorely missed wearing a uniform. Hoo-freakin'-ray, I can go back to dressing while on auto-pilot! :o)

We even have a choice of only one (1) color of scrubs to wear. So even THAT amount of decision-making has already been eliminated. Rest assured, the fewer things I have to think about when I first get up in the morning, the better. It's all good.

I do have to find out if there's any particular type of shoe that's required to be worn, though. If not, it's about time I get myself a new pair of sneakers anyway; I'll get one that'll look nice with the scrubs and consider myself ready for work.

I am SO ready for this job to start. I can't begin to render it in words.