Face Time With The Chief

As you may recall, my first two days back at work are comprising my yearly training.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned that earlier. But heck, as foggy as I was last week I could have told you I was flying off to Borneo to have my corneas waxed. Waaaay too many Nyquil Liqui-Caps.

Our annual training, which used to take an entire week of torture has been distilled down, by the grace of budget cuts, to two days.

The first day (today) was spent with CPR/AED (those portable defibrillator thingys), and the classroom part of defensive tactics.

In between those two gems of mysticism we got to have some face time with the new Warden.

This is new.

The old Warden you hardly ever saw unless you were in trouble or if he was showing some VIP around the camp. Sure, every now and then he'd light up a fat cigar and wander around the camp for awhile, but for the most part he stayed in his office.

This new Warden wants to get out and be seen. He says he wanted to hear our concerns and complaints. I can dig that. If he really means it, anyway. But if he really was a CO like us twenty five years ago, then he knows our concerns and complaints.

There aren't enough of us, we get paid jack, our benefits suck and everybody treats us like dumbsnits.

That's it in a nutshell. And there's not a damn thing he can do about any of that.

What we used to carry in a full tool bag as far as options with the offenders can now be carried in a wet tissue, thanks to the bleeding hearts in the legislature and complaints by the mostly felonious family members of career criminals.

And there's not a damn thing he can do about that either.

So we got to listen to an hour of whining about things that we can't fix. But hey, it counted towards our training so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Tomorrow morning we go in for the practical part of the defensive tactics class and the test out session. There aren't that many of us so I envision taking lots of breaks and filling alot of time watching St Francis and the Mad Bomber suck at ping pong.

My goal for the next day is to get through it without re-injuring my arm. I have been mostly pain free for about two weeks now and I really hope to make that a continuing trend.

So let's see what the auguries for tomorrow read. Checking the old teal leaves, so to speak.

Dang! Today would have been a good one. Charles Dickens Day. I could have limped up to the Warden with my paycheck stub in hand and said "Please Sir..... I want more!"

That would have been good for a laugh, anyway.

Tomorrow is Kite Flying Day. I'm sure it will be windy enough, but I'm sure the ice would build up on the string pretty rapidly. Maybe I'll just tie a string to my hopes of things getting better and see how high I can get....