Too Many Goats, Not Enough Rope

It happens once in awhile. A major goat rope. A cluster f*ck of epic proportions. One of those days when you run around holding both of your butt cheeks in your hands and yelling "Oh snap!"

Almost had one last night. T'was bloody close. But cooler heads (and one head who lost his cool for a moment) prevailed and we endured.

The house is still staying largely, alarmingly full. We have so few beds that when they decide to lock up more than one person at a time it gets dicey as to where we can put people. And they did it to us last night in the worst possible way.

There's a house I haven't discussed much. For some reason it's an adjunct of one of the "treatment" houses. It should be connected to the wobblehead house, instead. The guys that are in this unit are the super-mega-turbo wobbleheads. Regular mental health scores out on the hill run from 1 to 3. Down in wobbleland they run from 3 to 4. Down in this other unit, they are generally mental health 5's. Extremely crazy. Lifelong crazy. All the way to their toenails crazy. Crazy enough that they aren't allowed to mix with the regular offenders in any way. They get fed seperately, go to rec seperately, and are not allowed any contact with the regular inmates.

And two of them got into a fight last night and got locked up.

Oh, snap.

So we needed two single cells to put them in and we didn't have them. We had to move four people to open up cells to put them in and it almost didn't go well. And two of them didn't want to move. There was a single guy in a cell in D wing and a single guy in a cell in A wing. We decided to move the guy from D wing to A wing and open up a whole cell. The guy from D wing refused to pack up and move so we moved the guy from A wing in with him instead. Pissed them both off.

We were going to move two offenders from C wing into the empty cell together. One of them packed up and went right away. The other one didn't want to move and started to get loud about it. I started to walk away and get my dander up and Vinnie stepped up, pulled his pepper spray, slapped the window with it and shouted "Pack your stuff now! You're moving! Now!!!"

He packed up and moved.

Vinnie is my hero. Not necessarily a role model, but a hero nonetheless.

So disaster was averted. It could have been bad, but a little ingenuity and just a burst of anger got us through it unscathed.

We get lucky, sometimes.