Talking To Themselves

Finally got all of the windows open in the house the other day. That has been a weeks-long ordeal. All of the windows in the cells are locked from the inside. Which is just as ignorant as hell. We have to cuff the inmates and pull them out of the cell and go inside to open their windows. Then we have to repeat the process in a few months to close them again.

And I always dread having the windows open. It's bad enough to hear them scream at each other in the house, but we could always go outside for a little peace and quiet. Now they are screaming out the windows not only at each other, but at other offenders out on the hill. Usually, they are trying to get someone to bring them something. Cigarettes and coffee for the most part. Sometimes more.

I was sitting out on the rec yard the other day and listening to some guy in C-wing yelling at someone. He was pretty angry. The conversation went like this:

"Man, you don't bring me nothing to smoke, you don't bring me no coffee..... you won't even send me any f**king pictures like I want! And you just sit there and you won't even look me in the eye! Ni**a, just get the f*ck out of my room!"

I thought to myself "Uh-oh... somebody is snapping out. We will probably have to do a room move to separate those two!"

And he's moved on to incoherent raving and screaming "Get the f*ck out of my room, ni**a!" Over and over again. "I'll beat your a**, ni**a! Get the f*ck out of my room, ni**a!"

And then a light dawns and I think to myself, "Holy snap! He's in C-wing in a cell by himself!"

I nipped inside and around the corner to see the name on the door and a peek in the window. It's a name I don't recognize but I have stored in my brain for future reference. The offender is standing in the corner by the window and seemed to be yelling at someone seated on the toilet. I looked to make sure there wasn't anybody else in the cell. There wasn't.

Just shook my head and walked away. Made a mental note to myself to make sure this guy was taking his meds. And to keep a closer eye on him if the door is ever open.

It's bad enough having to deal with the fairly sane inmates. Sometimes dealing with these wobbleheads is an adventure all by itself. And when they get out of control writing them conduct violations usually does no good at all. They still get released back to the house when they want them. They sent Gumby back to the wobblehead house the day after I wrote him a violation for covering his cell window. He sat on the restraint bench and peed his pants on purpose and they still sent him back to the house.

Nice. They can have him. I'm tired of his crap (literally!) already.

Just like working the Hive, working the wobblehead house takes a different breed of cat. I've been down there a few times. Sometimes it's like walking down the hall in a horror movie about an insane asylum. Or the basement in the film Thirteen Ghosts. It's best to just walk through and make sure nobody is hurting themselves or anybody else and not listen to what is being said.

Just shake it off and move on.

Luckily, none of them seem to be H.P. Lovecraft fans. I think if I hear someone chanting "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" in the cell, I would run screaming from the building.

A man can only take so much......

Computer Training For Tards

So they threw out all of the "dumb terminals" and replaced them all with pc's. The Department of Social Services had all of these computers for years and when they upgraded we got them. Old Dells that are no longer made nor supported by the manufacturer.

Supposedly they were tidied up and reformatted and fixed.

Supposedly.

And the new system wouldn't accept our old passwords from the old system so we were forced to go to training to get our new passwords.

They forced us to sit through this 45 minute video presentation that was so simple that single celled organisms could have understood it. It spent ten minutes explaining what a mouse was and what the monitor was and which button on the mouse was the left and the right.

I was a little more than mildly insulted.

So I had to spend 45 minutes to get a new password that took me 30 seconds to log on and verify. And I did it twice in 30 seconds just to be sure.

I am now able to access the new system and the old AS-400 system. This gives me two email accounts that fill up with garbage every day and I have to empty them before I can do anything else.

When you first log on to the AS-400 all of your email pops up to the front. You have to do something with each one, either delete it or ignore it, before you can do anything at all with the system. So if you have been gone on vacation for two weeks and you're in a hurry to get some information, you're just screwed. And we aren't allowed to change that setting.

Apparently, we are considered too stupid to pour pee out of a boot with the directions on the bottom.

But then, most of us are. Hence, the tard training.

I survived, and the trainer did too, so I guess it was a good thing. She seemed like a nice woman, even if her video was promoting extreme violence.

It remains to be seen if I can still get on the system when I go back to work tomorrow. It has already broken down on me twice. Last night I logged on and all of my icons were gone off the desktop. That sucked.

I'm off to enjoy my one day off this week. If I can. The wife has some out of state company visiting and my house is full to the gunwhales with cackling women. I'm gonna have to jam my earbuds in for my mp3 player and go out and mow the lawn just to get some peace and quiet.

Sheesh.

Dodged A Bullet (Maybe)

Got down to the house late after going to my computer training class. I'll save a pithy description of the class for another post. It was insulting.

The whole way in I had this tight uncomfortable feeling between my shoulderblades like I was expecting someone to bury an axe there. But nobody even mentioned it. However, the Major wasn't even in, so I may have just bought a day. I don't know. When I got to the house there was a maintenance guy outside repairing the rec cages.

I went outside to observe and help him do a walk down afterwards to make sure no pieces of wire got left out there. He did a good job and we are secure again.

When we were outside doing rec last night I was hyper-aware of what the knuckleheads were doing. I was so alert that it was making them nervous. Especially the guys in the two last cages. They kept looking up at me watching them and saying "What???"

I think I'll go on the offensive. There is a set of yard lights between the rec yard and B-side rec that haven't worked for years. If they were repaired it would come close to doubling the light we have out there. It's not so bad in the summer when it's light later in the evening. But in the winter it gets positively dark out there.

So I'll put in a work order to have those lights fixed. They'll bitch and squawk and scream and I'll cite "Safety and Security" and it'll get done eventually. And the offenders in D and C wings will bitch about too much light at night.

I'll tell them "Close your eyes when you sleep. Then you won't notice the light."

That'll make them happy, I'm sure.

Working my day off today. For some reason we are hellishly short of people again. I'm going to grab all the overtime I can get. I figure I'll get what I can before they cut it out again.

We'll see what happens, I guess. And I'll keep practicing those Matrix moves.

Stressed Out

In the corporate world there is a catchphrase: "Mistakes have been made, others will be blamed."

It's a nice thought, but I can't blame anybody but myself.

Something got missed and I didn't catch it. Somebody could potentially get hurt because I got complacent and wasn't being alert.

What happened was, on midnight shift they searched a cell in the Hive and found a shank. This little creep has had shanks before. That's why he's locked up. Another 19 year old C-5 punk who feels more like a man if he has access to a weapon.

What it was made of was a six inch piece of fence wire. Straightened out and sharpened to a point on the end. A dandy little sticking weapon. So the day shift sarge went out and checked the fences outside and didn't see anything wrong. But when he went out on the rec yard, he found a hole in the wire between two of the cages. The last two on the end. There's a hole in the wire about eight inches wide and about twelve inches tall. Down at the bottom.

And I never saw it.

Someone has been pulling at that wire for a long time and breaking off pieces. My first guess is they wanted a hole so they could touch each other down there. They tend to sit down and the others arrange themselves so we can't see down to the end.

It's not in the outside fence, so we know it's not an escape attempt. So there's only two real explanations. One, they wanted to be able to touch each other where we couldn't see. Or two, they wanted the wire for weapons. Or even three, because they were bored.

I'm hoping to the gods that most of that wire got thrown outside the fence because they didn't want to get caught with it like that little jagoff did last night. I'm hoping there's no more chunks of wire hidden somewhere waiting for an opportunity.

But I should have caught it before it got as big as it did. And I didn't. And I 'm mad as hell at myself and sick to my stomach over the whole deal.

I'll be lucky if they don't kick me out of the house. I'll take the blame for it, because I should have been more attentive. I should have caught it. I pride myself on being alert and paying attention to the details and I let one slip right past me. And because I did, there might be weapons in my house.

Shit.

I'm sure the finger pointing and the butt chewing will start tomorrow. I just can't freaking wait.

I'm going to bed.

And I didn't see it until he pointed it out.

Slept In

Ack. I didn't wake up until ten o'clock. Now my day is going to be all off. We were short people last night, so they held some over from day shift. GM, who just went to days on sunday, got held over and sent down to our house. He was pissed.

So to get him out of the house as soon as possible, they sent him home at ten and asked me to stay until 11:30. Was sleepy as hell by the time I got home, but ended up not going to sleep until after 1 am.

It's cool that I got an hour and a half overtime, but man! that just throws my whole schedule off.

As soon as the wife gets back with our one working vehicle, I have to try to get my truck to a mechanic. Some guy my brother in law recommended. My whole morning is shot.

Sitting here slamming down the coffee and trying desperately to get awake. I hope I'm at least coherent by the time I get to work.

Luckily for everyone, my day at work went much better than my morning did. That was a close call.

Anyway, sorry about this rambling. I'll try to be more interesting tomorrow.

Update: I found a mechanic who will do the job and my truck should be done this afternoon! Yayyyyy! And a friend of ours in Scotland says that since we had three disasters yesterday, we should be done for awhile. Man, I sure hope so....

Frustrated

They came and installed our new computers yesterday! Yayyyyy!!!!

Oh, wait..... I haven't been to the training yet.... I can't get on the system.. Has ANYBODY in this room had the training so we can get on the new system????

Oh snap.

Luckily, Sgt Miz P had been so she could get on and get us the information we needed. If she hadn't, we would have been screwed. Our bubble officer (who rarely uses the puter) is going to training today. Chuck goes tomorrow and I go thursday.

Nice.

And we discovered that when they ran the lines for the new system (6 or more months ago) that they neglected to drop a line into the nurses office. So they can't hook her new computer up at all. And she hasn't been to the training, either.

What a great big steaming load of cheap state lowest bidder crap!!!!

On the way home last night the alternator in my truck died. All of the sudden my cd player died and my lights started to dim. Had to make it home on battery power. Hopefully I can jump it off and get it to the mechanic. There's at least $250.00 down the drain.

And this morning the wife asked me to take the aerator off the bathroom sink so we could clean the lime scrudge out of it. When I put a wrench on it to take it off, it was so jammed up that I broke the faucet. So I get to spend the morning running back and forth for parts and to the mechanic and replacing the bathroom faucet.

Snappy.

The inmates better hope my mood improves or somebody is going to have a bad day.

Update: I drove the little truck down to the mechanic to make sure they could get my big truck in today. I started smelling gasoline so bad it was making me nervous. When I got to the shop, I discovered that there is apparently a major hole in the gas tank. So now I am down two vehicles.

Ooooooooo........ SO not having a good day.

Several Items On The Agenda

First off, I was almost word for word on about BG on yesterdays post. But instead of shrugging and saying "Nothing much", he said "Not a whole lot." So that was good. A decent augury for the week.

Maybe I should learn to read tarot cards or something. I'm getting a bit superstitious in my old age. That twit Hoppy was in the house again last night (rolls and rolls his eyes) and first thing out of the gate he uses the "Q" word. I wanted to slap him. Of course, I wanted to do that as soon as he walked into the house, but that's another issue.

Luckily for him, he didn't jinx us.

Second, it looks like Vinnie is going to be coming off of the injured reserve list very soon. This is a very good thing. He's getting buggy and stir crazy sitting over in the Admin building every night reading policy. The boredom tempts him to do things that get him frowned at. This is not a good thing. Plus, he only gets to talk to the same two people all night long so when I come out he falls on me like an ice cream truck in the desert. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. But it will be good for him to get back to work so he will have something to blog about.

Third, Gumby was back up to his old tricks again. After the several moments of coherence the other day, he's gone back to being a jagoff. Playing in his poop, etc. They put him on close observation and gave him his clothes. When I came in he had stuffed everything but his pants out from under the door (stickily smeared with an unknown odiferous substance) and was doing his floor show naked in the cell again. At one point during the night he covered the window of his cell door with his blanket. I told him to take it down and he refused. So I opened the chuck hole and pulled it down myself. I pulled it halfway out and he grabbed the other end and wouldn't let go. At this point I had several options open to me. I could get in a tug-of-war with this idiot and one or more of us could have gotten hurt. I could have sprayed him, as his face was right there. That would have been satisfying, but I would have had trouble justifying it as I hadn't actually been told to take it away from him. So I went with the third option and let him keep it. Not out of any feelings that he might be entitled to it, but due to the fact that it was getting late and I didn't want to do any paperwork. I just wrote him a conduct violation and called it good.

And finally, I ran across an article in the New Statesman the other day. A link from a link from a link sort of thing. There are some pretty startling statistics down towards the bottom of the page. It says that there are approximately 1.6 billion internet users worldwide. And out of those 1.6 billion users there are 109 million blogs floating around in cyberspace. That's alot of something to say. But it also states that 99% of those 109 million blogs have no readers at all. So I consider myself lucky to have some readers. Even repeat readers! That's just kind of startling. You guys make me feel proud.