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.