More Paperwork

KP and I got into a little bit of a tussle with this squirrely little inmate tonight.

No big deal. Nobody really got hurt.

Apparently this little nutjob has some medical condition that makes one wrist bigger than the other. It looks swollen, but it's not due to an injury. But he has been playing it up.

We had to move him into a different cell and when I went to take the cuffs off of him he yelled and tried to pull my cuffs into the cell with him. Since his cellie was in there in cuffs I wasn't going to have him loose in the cell with one cuff on his wrist to use as a weapon.

So I hung onto the other one and KP grabbed his arm. There was no way in hell we were going to let him get both arms free in there like that.

Then I looked down and realized he had broken my favorite cuff key.

That sort of pissed me off.

I started to say "You little mother.." and KP talked right over the top of me (keeping a firm hold on the knuckleheads wrist all the while) saying "Turn around right now and stick your hand back out here!"

A distraction technique, you see. He was distracting me, not the inmate. Reminding me we had something to get done here. That's why he's my hero.

So we took him back out of the cell and figured that since he was planning on being such a problem anyway, we should go ahead and relocate him to C-wing.

Then he started telling everybody that I had assaulted him. I imagine that I will get pulled out under investigation. Damn.... I was going for the record.

So three hours of paperwork for the use of force and another hour for the broken cuff key later it was time to go home.

And just to make matters worse while we were up doing the paperwork, one of the yard sergeants referred to me as "Our version of WD." Someone I won't name out loud but who is well known for dubious uses of force and has been kicked out of more housing units that I have ever worked.

That pissed me off worse than the broken cuff key. What an a**hole.

And I got to make the Captain mad for trying to be efficient. He apologized later. That was a bit startling.

So if anything is wrong with the paperwork, I will not be answering my phone this weekend.

I will be making chairs instead.

Alarming

I didn't mean to scare anybody...... honest.

I just thought it should be brought to someones attention.

Right outside of the back of the prison is a public road. People can drive by and see the inmates on the yard doing..... well, let's not get in to that.

On one end of the road is a P&P office and on the other end is the county sheriffs office and jail. I'm sure us being so handy and all saves the state oodles in transportation.

It's like one stop shopping for all of your antisocial and felonious needs.

(And the Rev roooooollls his eyes)

But on three sides we are surrounded by an outer road that is state property and not for the general public.

On occasion someone gets lost and has to be directed back off of the property.

My rec yard is out back and we have a pretty good view of two sides of the prison. Once or twice we have called in to report strange vehicles or people out on the outer road.

Like tonight.

A pickup truck pulled onto the outer road, drove along for about 25 yards and stopped. The driver (who I couldn't see very well) was just sitting in the truck looking through the fence. After a few seconds he started to make me a little nervous so I called the P-Car on our side and told him there was a truck on the outer road and he should go check it out.

What I got back from the control center was "10-9?! 10-9 your last transmission!!!"

So I repeated myself. Wondering why they sounded so panicky.

Apparently since I was back behind the Hive they weren't picking me up well and didn't hear all of what I had to say. I had to repeat myself again and once more on channel two before they understood me.

It seems it was just the power plant guy driving around and checking things out. Supposedly he does that now and then. Hell, I didn't know that. I figured it was something they might want to know.

It's a good thing they finally heard me clearly and we got things straightened out. I would have felt bad if someone had gotten fidgety and shot him by accident.

Maybe I should just tend to my own knitting. I don't seem to share the same priorities as everybody else.

Bubble Time....

I guess it had been long enough. I had forgotten how much I just don't like running the bubble. I'm sure glad I didn't bid on that spot. I thought about it, but I didn't.

Miz Maybe had found herself to be physically inconvenienced and had to go home. I stepped up there in the interim, just so she could go as quickly as possible and found myself there for the duration.

My fault, entirely. I could have stuck one of the ensuing flock of utility officers they pressed on us during the evening up there. But I figured I took it so I might as well ride it out.

And it wasn't very long before I started to remember all of the things that used to drive me completely batsh*t when I worked the bubble.

1. The other staff will always time their questions over the intercom when you are halfway down the stairs to the bathroom.

2. The intercom doesn't work if you aren't there to push the button. So no matter how loud you yell "Hold on! I'm in the freaking bathroom!!!", they cannot hear you and will keep shouting their questions.

3. They will all be seated in the office until the very second that your butt hits the chair, at which point everyone will leave the office and run in all directions.

4. Med pass and rec will never ever be in the same wing at the same time. They are always at opposite ends of the house so you have to run back and forth and hope that you don't get confused about which door you are opening in which wing.

5. If you stick your head out the door to smoke, a lieutenant will walk up. And if you get relief to actually step out and smoke, your relief won't know how to open the doors so you'll have to go back in anyway.

And I have discovered that the only thing worse than being on a diet or being in the bubble is being on a diet in the freaking bubble. I always get fidgety up there and want to be snacking on something and tonight I brought a minimal amount of food because I need to lose some weight.

If anybody asks, that just really really sucked.

But I think I probably ran off a few pounds up there tonight. They kept me hopping.

And hopefully it will be many a long taco before I have to experience that again.

Same Old Routine

Some days I think I could just do my job by email. Some of the days are just so predictable and humdrum That I think I could just send in a recording of my voice saying "No. You're beat." and give it to somebody going down to the Hive with directions to play it for every inmate who asks a question.

I could say "If you take out the bottom walk of D-wing for rec, they are going to give you trouble. Nothing too serious, but enough to piss you off. Cut them short and don't let them have anything at all extra. Screw 'em." And "When the knucklehead in C-15 realizes that he forgot to ask for his PRN meds and the nurse doesn't bring them, he's going to try and call a Code 16 and kick on his door for several hours."

Then play the tape that says "No. You're beat."

It's those kind of nights that just fill in between the ones where we have to run our legs off and run the risk of meeting the concrete hard.

They are my bread and butter, but they sure are boring.

It's that going between moments of high stress and long tedium that I think makes most people not want to stay down in the Hive very long. If it was all just fun and games and thumping knuckleheads all day long I think I would have gotten tired and too banged up to be still doing it after all this time.

And if it was nothing but those routine nights where I could have phoned it in, I wouldn't have started down there in the first place. I would have bid on someplace more exciting like the sally port on midnight shift or something.

Luckily for me, the stress moments keep on coming and the routine is always there as a backdrop.

One of these days I'm going to get tired enough to go somewhere else.

But in the meantime, I'll just keep on going.

The Chicken Leg Incident

This just goes to show how stupid inmates can screw up anything. You could house them in a palace and they would turn it into a trash dump in no time flat.

Of course, some of us aren't all that much better, as you will see later.

About one a month we would have "chicken quarters" for dinner. Just a leg and a thigh of mostly cooked chicken. Nothing to write home about, but at least you knew it was real chicken and not some processed meat byproduct of dubious origin.

Chicken night was always annoying because for two or three nights later we would be seeing gnawed chicken bones come sliding out under cell doors onto the walk. And the mouse and cockroach population would hold jubilant ceremonies in the wings.

I remember my first night in the Hive when they served chicken. And I saw some of those bones laying around and thought to myself "Man! I'll bet you could hurt somebody with one of those if you really tried!"

But the subject never came up. Until this weekend, that is.

Apparently while I was off on my back pain hiatus they had chicken quarters and some genius threatened to shank his cellie with a chicken bone.

And of course it got paid attention to and sent up the chain and somebody took it seriously. So from now on, whenever they serve chicken quarters on the hill, they will be sending chicken patties down to the Hive.

I'd like to see some snaphead try and shank his cellie with a chicken patty.

No..... one of those idiots would probably try it. But you get the idea. No more chicken for us. Back to the mystery meat for eternity.

Pfui.

But on the subject of staff members you wouldn't invite home after work, they sent us a utility officer to replace Miz Maybe up in the bubble.

Of course it was the weekend after payday and she had to call out again. I wish they would pay her just once a month so she would be in more often.

Anyway, they sent us the one officer that everybody flinches when they see him walk into their house. You probably know who I mean. He has a voice like Kermit the frog on valium.

At one point BG had gone back inside to get something and bubble guy was up there with his boots and socks off trimming his toenails. He toiled at that chore for the most part of an hour before he was done.

Hey, at least he had his feet up on day shifts locker and not on ours. Thank Gawd for small favors.

We speculated that if we came back in we would find him with cucumber slices on his eyes, cold cream on his face and little slips of paper between his toes, sunning himself under the desk lamp in a little terrycloth robe.

That whole thing just put horrible pictures in my head.

And I wondered what would have happened if something had kicked off. Would he have been running around up there barefoot or would he have just said "You gotta wait. The paint isn't dry yet! I'll smudge!"

I often wonder who is nuttier. Them or us.

I still do.

A Hair-Raising Experience!

If you've been keeping up, you'll know that I called in sick on Thursday. My back was hurting pretty bad and I didn't think I would survive another night in the Hive without some relief. Something other than comic relief, anyway.

I got into the doctors office this morning. I like my doctor, he's a good cat. But I'm beginning to suspect that anybody who is trained to manipulate parts of your body ie: doctors, physical therapists, x-ray techs, chiropractors, etc have all been trained on manuals written first by Vlad The Impaler and maybe refined by Josef Mengele. They always seem to feel that the best way to make you feel better is to make you do whatever hurts you the most.

"If it doesn't hurt or taste nasty, it can't be medicine." My Grandma always said that. I think she trained at that same school.

Doc starts out poking me with his fingers up and down my spine. I'm pretty sure at one point he replaced his thumb with a soldering iron. All the times he's muttering "Ooooo boy. I'll bet that hurts!"

Yeah, it did.

Then he had me lay on my back on the table and he wrapped me up like a pretzel and said "Deep breath" which hurt, and then said "Let it out" which hurt too. Then he dove on top of me like Jimmy "Super Fly" Snuka off the top rope and mashed me into the table. My spine made noises like I had laid down on a box of Fruit Loops.

That loosened me up for round two, where he had me lock my fingers behind my neck and he proceeded to put me in a full nelson and shake me like a terrier with a rubber chew toy.

More crunchy noises ensued.

He prodded me a few more times with the soldering iron then said "I'm going to give you a shot back there. That will help."

That sentence did nothing to make me feel better.

He returns with a nurse and one hand behind his back.

Oh.

Hell.

This can't be good.

He has me up against the table with my shirt pulled up and I feel his thumbs poking up and down my back. It feels like:

Poke poke doink! Moves up.

Poke poke doink! Moves up.

Poke poke doink! Moves up.

Poke poke doink!

I'm thinking to myself "Hell, that wasn't so bad!"

Then he moves back down to the lower point and I hear the cap pop off of a hypodermic needle. He says "Little stick."

Awwww..... snap. I thought he had already done that. Apparently he was just marking the spots with a pen. And I fell for it.

The first one wasn't so bad. A little stick and a little burning. No worries.

He moves up and I hear the cap pop off a second needle and I realize why he had them behind his back. There were four of them. Seeing that would have worried me.

The second and third ones weren't so bad either. After the third one the nurse made a joke and he started laughing and I almost did too. I said "Making me giggle while he's poking my spine with a needle is not really a good idea, you know." Doc just pats my shoulder and says "You'll be okay."

Now that last injection must have hit the sweet spot. That sucker went in and all of the hair on my legs shot straight out and my feet were suddenly soaked in sweat. That one hit something. Hopefully it was something good.

Doc told me to go home and relax and not do any heavy lifting for a day or so and take tylenol.

Man, I hope this works!

Calling Out Broken

Got up this morning and could just barely crawl out of bed. The pain in my back kept me awake off and on most of the night.

I wish I knew what I did so that I would never ever do it again.

Called the doctor and they can't get me in until tomorrow. Snap.

So I called in and said I was taking a sick day. At this point I'm not even sure I could shave without hurting myself. And I sure as hell aint going in to listen to those jokers who make me laugh all of the time. Last night was painful enough.

Luckily I found some painkillers left over from my last trip to the dentist. But they make me so foggy my mind keeps wandering away. It still hurts, I just don't notice it so much. I guess you gotta take the lemon with the meringue.

At any rate, I'm going to go have a little lie down and hope the doctors office calls with a cancellation. They might be able to get me in. That would be extra sweet.

Besides, I keep forgetting what I'm doing. Good thing the wife will be able to drive me. I might end up in Michigan or something.

Be careful.