At a job a few years back I was the manager of a small field maintenance crew. We were tasked with maintaining wireless equipment (antennas on towers and commer

At a job a few years back I was the manager of a small field maintenance crew. We were tasked with maintaining wireless equipment (antennas on towers and commercials buildings) for about 10,000 customers. Our company had been purchased recently and the policy of the new owners was that any time anyone was in any kind of 'incident' in a company vehicle, every employee in the vehicle had to be picked up by their manager, driven to the drug testing facility, tested, and driven home to their doorstep and then couldn't return to work until the test came back, sometimes several days later. The last winter I was there we got hit with a major snowstorm. One of our towers on the top of a mountain was having problems, causing service interruptions for about 7,000 customers. Our safety policy mandated at least two technicians at a job like this, and one of my 3 technicians was out of town. I took one of the others with me and headed for the tower, which was about 2 miles up a dirt road that was now covered in about 2 feet of snow. Right after pulling on to the road, the company truck brushed up against a fence post that I didn't see because it had fallen over and was buried in the snow. The post left a scratch in one of the body panels of the truck that would have to be repaired. There was no way I'd be able to get it repaired without being asked about the drug test. I called my manager and he made a few calls hoping we could get an exception to the drug test rule this time around. No luck. This was right around the time of the holidays - maybe even New Years Eve, if I remember correctly. The only drug testing center open was about an hour drive from where we were, in the opposite direction of where we lived. My manager had to come pick us up, take us to the center, drive us home, then go pick up my last remaining technician, drive back to the tower, drive up to the tower (by this time it was dark), and then start troubleshooting the problem. Turned a 90 minute outage in to a 6 hour outage. Then of course it took several days for the drug tests to come back, so my manager and one remaining technician had to deal with all of the aftermath of the storm in the same way. I'll bet this one incident offset any positive outcomes that company has seen from drug testing, if indeed there have been any.