A Key Player

Some people are deep. Some are shallow. And there are some people you just never know about. They just leave you shaking your head thinking "What the snap?"

We have a new.... Well, he's not new. He's been around for awhile. Maybe six months or so. Little guy, but not weak or frail. Maybe ten years older than me. More or less. It's hard to tell sometimes.

Many of us don't seem to know quite what to think of him. At first glance, I thought he was a complete idiot. Now I don't know. But then again, my first impression may have been right on the mark.

I've dubbed him the "Professor". He doesn't look like one, but his head is sure up in the clouds 99% of the time and definitely not on what he's doing. And we all know that especially in this line of work that is not a really good thing.

I know he thinks about things. I've had conversations with him that were pretty deep. I know that he successfully keeps bees and has for years and that takes thought and the ability to reason and plan things out. He's not just some brain dead turnip.

They made him the education and library officer this evening and I got elected to go help him count. That was a good thing. He'd not done it before and he would have screwed up count for days. Fortunately I had done education a time or two.

It went pretty good, from a glance anyway. We counted together and came up with the same totals and everything was good. But when he was calling in his count to the control center I realized that he had transposed the numbers from 9 house and the numbers from 25 house on his sheet. It's a good thing I caught that or 9 house would have had too many inmates and 25 not nearly enough.

But we got that fixed. No big deal.

Then one of the teachers and I tried to tell him how to do his releases after count clears. We told him four times and he wasn't understanding it. So I wrote it down and he still got it wrong.

I sighed, rubbed my eyes and told him one more time, slowly, in words of one syllable. He seemed to have it that time so I went back out to the yard.

Later on that evening we heard him call for Sgt Archer to come to the library. Sgt Uncle T and I were closer on our side and we got there first. The door was locked and we waited for him to open it. He came to the door and muttered something. Sgt Uncle T said "What?" and pressed his ear to the door while I stood there wondering.

He'd locked his keys in the bathroom and couldn't get out of the building.

After the library was closed and everybody, including the librarian was gone, he went in to use the bathroom and laid his keys on the sink. When he was done he walked out and snapped the padlock shut and realized the ring of keys was still on the sink inside.

Luckily I had a key to the library on my ring, but not one to the bathroom. So I ran him up on the cart to go get the librarians keys and bring him back. Sgt Uncle T stayed there and explained the problem to Sgt Archer and Capt CJ through the other door while they laughed.

I told the Professor on the way back that we were going to give him hell about this forever. He didn't seem to mind that too much and took the ribbing he got with good humor.

But in a place like this you never lay your keys down and leave them anywhere at any time. And he seemed to take it like it was no big deal. Maybe we should have been harder on him, I don't know.

I guess we just have to hope that when push comes to shove, and it will, that he will be there and not wandering off in some other direction.

Deep? Shallow? I can't tell. He seems to come and go in waves. We'll see, I guess.

So Tuesday, aside from being the First Day of Summer, is also Cuckoo Warning Day. That means if you hear a cuckoo then it will be a wet summer. Man, I sure hope wobbleheads don't count as cuckoos. We may all drown.