Oh man, I have been there with the SoberLink-tampering-for-no-earthly-reason alcoholic (although the air-hose thing is new to me - wouldn’t you get an alert about that, because it would screw up the facial recognition part of SoberLink? In other words, he may have been telling you he was tinkering with SL to see what you would do, when he really wasn’t). Indeed, I was on a first-name basis with the COO of SoberLink Ltd to check on various excuses and alerts(“Hi, it’s me again, the monitored party said a squirrel sat on his phone which produced a false positive ...”). All I can say is what you already know:
1. Alcoholics don’t like being treated as though they can’t be trusted. But they really can’t be trusted, so that’s why we treat them that way.
2. SL is not just about “do you have alcohol in your blood at this exact moment in time?”. It’s also about “can you be relied on to do things that you said you would do to ensure that kids are safe with you?” and “do you take parenting seriously enough that you will put up with a very small amount of inconvenience or embarrassment in order to play a role in your children’s lives?”, regardless of whether there is alcohol in his bloodstream at exactly 10.53 AM Mountain Standard Time. It sounds like the answer to those two questions is “no”.
3. SL is an opportunity [I]for the alcoholic[I] to demonstrate that they are completely safe and trustworthy to be around kids, it’s not just a way for you to catch the alcoholic. Because it is a neutral, objective third-party monitoring system, the alcoholic can use it to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that they are not drinking. A normal person would jump at the opportunity to create a track record of sobriety by providing abundant clean tests and complying exactly with the protocol. But this is not a normal person.
You’re doing the right thing. You need a break from the exhaustion of monitoring an alcoholic. It’s hard.