We were talking last night about how they finally spent some good money and did something.... almost right. The state spent a bazillion dollars last year putting in a new system for the sinks and toilets that limits the water and limits how many times the toilets can be flushed in a given time period. Supposedly it will pay for itself in about ten years. Of course, the hardware won't last ten years, but hey....You can only flush the toilet once every five minutes or twice in the space of an hour. Something like that. It cuts down on the water they use. If the place is still standing in ten years it will save the state a few bucks a month. The problem was is that the only house that really needed a system like that was ours. We used to have a real problem with flooding. It seemed like it was their favorite thing to do. Some knucklehead would shove a t-shirt or a pair of pants or their mattress stuffing down the toilet and flush and flush and flush until water ran everywhere. This would happen six to ten times a week.
And we would have to stop whatever it was we were doing and get inmate porters to clean up the mess, which sometimes involved getting everybody out of their cells one at a time to clean them out, there being no drains in the cells. And if it happened during a meal, they would all cry because they would be standing in water to get their trays and complain because the food was getting cold and complain because it was toilet water but what could we do? Nothing. Take it or leave it. I don't care and there's nothing I can do about it. You got complaints? Talk to the a**hole that flooded the wing, not me!
I have to admit we used to get some pretty spectacular floods. Sometimes they would stuff something under the door to retain as much water in the cell as they could before letting it go. I've seen floods that went from one wing to another. Those were crazy. And sometimes we wouldn't catch on they were flooding until the inmates in the next wing started throwing a fit.
Good times. Good times. I almost miss it.
But not that much.
