It's A Blog About Nothing!

Back when I first started this blog, I was down in the Hive on day shift and needed a place to vent. It was extremely stressful and I was having trouble sleeping and needed somewhere to blow besides at the wife and kids. They didn't put up with that very well, as you can imagine. I get to be a real pr*ck when I'm stressed.

So I started ranting here. I could scream all I wanted, because back then nobody was listening. And the walls here are nice and soft when I bang my head against them.

But now that I'm not down there anymore my stress levels have dropped considerably along with the odds that I would drop dead of an aneurism.

The down side of that is that my blog has become what the investigator called it when he read my stuff. Boring. Nothing more than a personal journal.

Take today for an example:

They made me the Education/Library officer this evening. I wasn't looking forward to it because education is always a pain in the butt. The classrooms are separated between two different buildings; the first and second floor of one building and the second floor of the other. I always worried that something would happen in one building while I was dealing with a situation in the other one.

There would be, of course, multiple locked doors between me and where I wanted or needed to be. And there I would be, fumbling with a huge set of unfamiliar keys and frustration would only make it worse.

There are, in my opinion, entirely too many different locks in this place. I completely understand it from a security standpoint. More locks means more keys which means less of a chance that somebody will be able to work their way through them to escape. But my personal aggravation standpoint bares it's teeth and snarls each time I have to fumble for an unknown key to open a door.

Luckily for me today they closed education early and the classrooms were emptying out as I walked in the door. That was just fine with me. I could close up one building entirely and have nothing but the library to deal with. And it didn't open up again until 6:00pm when the yards opened.

I spent the first 2-1/2 hours of my shift eating my dinner and reading a book. A nice change of pace. The librarian is a nice lady who made coffee and sat outside and smoked with me.

I could work in a library, I think. A real one full of humans, not this one hip deep in inmates. It's not bad, as far as small libraries go. I asked the librarian and she said they had about 14,000 books there, which was a bit startling. It didn't look like that many.

That made me feel like a bit of an amateur, though. Last time I checked our books here at home we had a bit less than 2,000 of them. I don't have room for 14,000 books, but I would like to.

After the library closed at 8:00, I went out and wandered the yard until I ran into the Watcher and I hung out with him for a little while then called Lt Baby Boy and asked him if they needed me anywhere. He just said "Naw! Go out on the yard and find somebody to argue with!"

Heck, I could do that. And I stayed out there for the rest of the shift, pretty much doing what I had done all day, which was nothing. It was a bit blissful. And I almost felt guilty getting paid for that eight hours.

But not enough to give the money back, or anything. Let's not be silly.

Wednesday is Eat What You Want Day and Twilight Zone Day. It's also National School Nurse Day and national Night Shift Workers Day. Huzzah!