A Fruitless Exercise

The picture won't make sense for a little while further down the post. Then it makes sense. Just hang with me a bit.

But it is a pretty funny picture.

Anyway, I found out what the super secret detail was that I got pulled off the yard for. There was a group of women who belong to some company that gathers information for the federal government. They came to interview 347 of our offenders and have them take a survey.

If they cooperated and took the survey, they got a small bag of cookies. Their part took 30 minutes and they got cookies. I worked for four hours and didn't get any.

And the Feds wonder why Americans are so disgruntled. **sigh**

The main crux of the survey and interview was about sex in prison. And apparently their focus was on non-consensual sex.

Their funding, it seems, comes from PREA, the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The same fine people who paid for our new camera system two years ago. Who, of course, had cameras put in all of the places where rape is not likely to occur. But hey, I don't want to see that either.

I hate to burst their bubble, but they are never going to eliminate either sex or rape in prison. It's pointless. For one thing, it's what makes going to prison such a bad idea. Take that away and this place would become a country club. Almost every single comedian ever had a prison rape joke. Talking about being in a cell with Big Bubba who's saying "You're my little puppy now, boy!"

The only way you could ever completely eliminate that sort of thing is to completely isolate every single inmate from every other single inmate and never let them get within arms reach of each other.

Is that ever going to happen? Well snap, no.

Ergo, it will continue to be both a problem and a deterrent.

But, even though it was pointless, I spent four hours bringing them the inmates off of their list so they could interview them. And this evening I brought them the final dozen inmates and after that they took their notebooks and their laptops and their leftover cookies and went on to another prison.

We got done an entire day early and I'm glad. Everyone is glad they are gone. Not that they weren't nice ladies, you understand. They were all very pleasant. But they were inconveniencing us and upsetting our routines and that's never a good thing.

I was afraid I was going to be doing the same thing tomorrow until I went out and looked at the chrono last night. Apparently I had asked for tomorrow off a month or so ago and gotten it and forgotten.

So I'm off tomorrow. Yay! Got to get ready for the weekend.

The Watcher and I are traveling north to, of all things, an anime convention.

No, that was not a typo.

The mad genius behind the e-comic Dominic Deegan, Oracle For Hire , Michael "Mookie" Terracciano, will be there. The watcher got me hooked on reading this strip a few years ago and now is my chance to meet him finally.

So we are going to wade through crowds of fanboys and catgirls and I'm sure all of the Pokemon characters to meet this guy and hopefully reemerge with our wits still about us.

I'll leave the pepper spray at home, I think. It would be too tempting.

So Friday is Rubber Eraser Day. Ironically, it is also Leonardo DaVinci's birthday. On the other hand, it's also Take A Wild Guess Day and That Sucks Day.

I guess it would suck if your wild guess was wrong.