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Most passengers in this state of urinary trepidation would already have sprinted to the lavatory. They would have ignored pleas from flight attendants asking that they remain seated until the airplane came to a complete stop and the seat belt sign flicked off. But I wasn't a passenger. I was on the job, sitting in a flight attendant jump seat, lips pursed, thighs crossed, trying to stem a mounting urge to purge. And though I longed for the friendly confines of an airplane lavatory -- to hear the rush of digested Coca-Cola ricocheting off the metal splash plate, the reassuring whoosh of a mechanized flush and the sigh of my own blessed relief -- I refused to evacuate the contents of my bladder until the threat of a drug test had passed.

Flight attendants are subject to random drug tests at the completion of every trip sequence. Mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration and implemented by every U.S. airline, such tests are designed to protect the flying public from druggie cabin crew members who, under the influence of narcotics, might mistakenly deliver a chicken entree when the passenger asked for beef. That's fair enough. But when an arriving crew member is asked to provide a urine sample and the well happens to have run dry, the employee is forced to sit in an airport medical facility -- ingesting liquids, dreaming about torrential floods and waterfalls -- until the well is replenished and an appropriate amount of piss can be extracted for analysis.

As the passengers filed through the aircraft door on this particular day, I listened for, but did not hear, the "flight attendants all clear" P.A. This announcement, though frowned upon by airline management, is occasionally delivered by a benevolent purser. Once the airplane door has opened and the purser realizes there is no supervisor waiting to nab a potentially drug-crazed crew member, the announcement is made -- hardly raising the eyebrows of deplaning passengers. Immediately after hearing this signal, flight attendants disappear into lavatories like audience volunteers in a magic act. But this time, there was no such announcement. As I crept toward the exit door, my bladder on fire, my crew bag rolling behind me like an obedient pet, I noticed a supervisor with a clipboard. She was standing on the lip of the jet bridge, trading whispers with the purser. As I wheeled around the corner they both turned to look at me.

"Sorry," said the purser, wearing a look that said I'm glad it's you and not me. "They got you."

I followed the supervisor down the jet bridge, up an escalator, into a concourse, along a moving walkway, through the immigration checkpoint, down an escalator, past a gauntlet of customs officials, through a set of automatic doors, up another escalator, into another concourse, through an unmarked door, down one of those dingy airport corridors that passengers never see, and then stepped into the company medical facility. There, while facing the unsmiling face of a health care professional, I was given a plastic cup and told to get down to business.

In the bored stentorian voice of a prison guard addressing a new inmate, the health care professional (we'll call her Nurse Nancy) told me that a proper level of urine was necessary to achieve adequate test results. If I failed to fill the cup to a mark approximately two-thirds up, the sample would be negated and I would be banished to a chair, watched like a pedophile at a grade-school playground and told to drink, drink, drink until my bladder swelled and a more appropriate level of urine could be extracted. I've heard horror stories about employees forced to wait for hours because their internal plumbing failed to produce.

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