My Concerned Face

I'm not sure how much time I have spent in my life wondering about people. I'm suspecting it's a good percentage of it.

In my line of work, you would think I would have gotten past that by now.

But people still amaze me every day. Well, maybe amaze isn't exactly the right word. Astound. Confound. Flabbergast.

And occasionally amaze. That's cool, too. It's a nice change now and then.

But I really have to wonder about whoever that is in Tulsa, Oklahoma who has been reading my blog steadily for a day and a half straight.

It was kind of startling. I usually average 30-40 hits a day on here. On a real good day 50-60. Nothing earth shattering, but I'm not trying to be the next Paul Harvey or Rush Limbaugh (whoever). I just get on here to rant and get this stuff out of my head.

But yesterday I looked at my stats and had 170 hits. I thought "Wow!" And when I looked most of them were from the same person in Tulsa. I could see them going through each post one at a time. And just now when I got home I checked again and today I had 193 hits! And there it was, that same poor person slogging through this mess one post at a time.

Dude..... are you okay over there?

Do you need me to call anybody?

This really isn't very safe, you know. The inside of my head isn't very pretty sometimes. I can't be held responsible if something in your head breaks from this. You might like it better with a little moderation.

Let's be careful out there.

How To Win Friends.......

You know, there is a way to deal with people when you want something. You learn it in school and you learn it from your friends and you learn it from your parents. You share. You ask politely. You wait your turn.

Most of us have this down pat by the time we are say..... six years old or so.

Some people, it seems, never get the concept.

Take, for example, this idiot that was up in B-23. I say was because even tho the Boss said not to move him, he is now in C-1 on suicide watch.

Every time we put him in a cell with someone else he would either get in a fight with them or declare them an enemy and demand to be moved. He threatens to kill anybody who gets near him when he is behind the door. So we stuck him in a cell where his cellie has been on outcount for two years and isn't likely to come back anytime soon.

He didn't seem to like that much and has been demanding to be put in a cell with someone else. And he's been being an ass about everything in hopes we will move him. The game he has been playing lately is not giving up his tray after the meals. That got him put first on styrofoam trays and then today on sack meals.

Nobody ordered his sack meal from the chow hall, so when we got the food we didn't have anything to give him. I called and they said they would send something down with the truck when it came back. Chuck fed the wing (everybody but him) and told him he would get his sack meal when the truck came back.

I went into the wing awhile later to do something and he was kicking on his door calling me bi*ch-a*s this and mother fuc*ing that and I had better give him his motherfuc*ing food right motherfuc*king now! I told him (politely, but I don't know why I bothered) that his food was coming. He didn't like that answer and kept up with the kicking and the screaming and calling me names.

He never did manage to hurt my feelings and I think that pissed him off a little bit.

After awhile Chuck went into B-wing to pick up the trays and he was still in there singing the same old song demanding his food and calling Chuck everything but his nephew. Chuck treats temper tantrums the same way I do: he ignores them. That just pissed this little idiot off so he said the one phrase that is bound to catch our attention: "I'm gonna kill myself!"

Yup. That got our attention. Chuck, Ms. Dorothy, Ms. W and I were all at the door when it came open and Ms. W and I each took an arm to "escort" him to C-wing. He tried to pull away once and it almost went bad from there but we got him in the cell and stripped out and gave him a smock and made the calls to put him on suicide watch for the night.

And as soon as the door was shut he started kicking and screaming and demanding his food.

Took it awhile for it to get there. The um...... truck was late. Yeah....

I think his parents need a talking to as well. They did a lousy job raising that boy.

Bedlam

The term "bedlam" which means uproar, noise and confusion, was first coined from the Bethlehem Royal Hospital in Beckenham, London. Apparently many people there had trouble pronouncing Bethlehem so they shortened the name to Bedlam. It was a mental hospital first opened in 1247 and it was one of the first of it's kind in the world. People likened the word to the sound of the screaming inmates. Ergo a cacophonous noise is now referred to as "sounding like bedlam!"

I just worked a shift in bedlam.

After we came in from rec I went into C-wing to go through the laundry bags for any incoming contraband. Nine times out of ten we find something. This must have been the tenth time. I didn't find anything. But as I was standing there searching the 160+ laundry bags I got to listen to everyone in the wing screaming at the same time.

To begin with, we have the dude in c-7 that sounds just like one of the hillbillies from Bugs Bunny's "Hillbilly Hare" doing an hour long impromptu bluegrass rap where he alternated between threatening the other offenders in the wing, calling them all child molesters and homosexuals and offering to sleep with them or any member of their family they choose. It was pretty good for an off the cuff performance. He also would occasionally praise god and/or jesus and offer to sleep with them too.

The guy in 2 cell was just praising god and singing hymns at the top of his lungs while beating on the cell door.

9 cell went back and forth between singing a medley of Rod Stewart songs and offering me exorbitant amounts of money if I would let him out to beat up somebody else in the wing. I never was exactly clear who it was he wanted to beat up, but the offer reached into the billions of dollars at one point.

The two lovebirds in 13 and 25 were screaming sweet nothings at each other and promising their eternal love. Of course, when he wasn't screaming at 13 cell, 25 was screaming out the window at D-wing and looking for someone to sleep with over there if he could get moved. I don't foresee a long and happy romance for those two.

15 cell went back and forth between riling up anybody who would listen to him and screaming profanity at me. I think he was the only one who noticed I was in there. I think it pissed him off that he wasn't pissing me off. That's funny.

10 cell was standing at his door listening to all of this and would say "That's sick!" when there was a lull in the conversation.

3 cell is our old pal Gunny and he was laying on his bunk screaming "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu*k Nooo! Fuuuuuuuuuuuu*k Noooo!" over and over again.

And 5 cell was beating on his door and screaming for water and he wanted clothes and a blanket and some soap and some toilet paper and something to eat.......

And the guy in 9 cell finally noticed I was there with the laundry and started describing his laundry bag so I could find it for him. He said "It's blue and I had two sheets, three boxers, two pair of socks and a towel. No wait, it's a blue bag and I had two sheets, two pair of boxers, a towel.... no wait. It was blue......"

I have a headache.

What Time Is It?

This one little phrase "Hey CO! What time is it?" is almost invariably the first thing I hear when I arrive and the last thing I hear when I leave.

I counted one day. I got asked that question fifty-two times in eight hours. I think if someone was to come up to me on the streets and ask me that I would probably punch them in the eye.

They know what time it is. They know that I get there at the same time every day and I leave there at the same time every day. They know what time it is. They don't really care what time it is. It's just a way of trying to get me to acknowledge their existence. They just want some individual attention. I understand that in my brain but it still drives me nuts.

I've gotten to the point where I don't answer most of the time. I just tune them out into the general background noise like they never even spoke. I'm seriously thinking about losing my watch altogether so I'll just wave my bare wrist and shake my head.

It did get to me once, tho.

I'd already had a bad day for one reason or another (use of force, paperwork, I dunno) and I was already in a crabby mood. I was walking through the wing and maybe ten offenders had asked me the question and even though I had answered it ten times in an increasingly loud voice this one numbnuts decided he just had to ask me again what time it was. I went up to his door and said "Why? Does it matter? Do you have a date? Are you going somewhere? Is there a bus coming? Is a bomb fixing to go off? Are you going to miss your plane? Is anything important at all going to happen this afternoon? Does it make you feel any better that even though you are going to spend the next ten years in prison a measly ten minutes have passed since the last time you asked me? Is it really that freaking important to find out that it is two-freaking-thirty in the afternoon that you are willing to piss me off this bad? Is it that freaking important?"

He just looked at me with kind of a shocked look and said "Sorry."

On the upside, nobody in that wing asked me the question for the rest of the evening.

Maybe I should do that more often. Do you think?

Off Topic Rant

Just want to slide off of the topic of working in a prison full of stupid people here for a moment and dive into a quick rant.

The country is in bad shape. There are jobs being lost and businesses being shut down every day. The economy sucks and nobody has any money to fix any of our domestic problems. Those of us lucky to have jobs aren't being paid very much with no hope of any relief in the future.

So why are we spending billions of dollars to wage war in at least two different countries where we are not wanted? Why are we spending that money over there when we have so many problems over here?

What would happen in Iraq and Afghanistan if we just took our people out of there and said "Figure it out for yourself, we don't want to play anymore."? Would they self destruct? And why should we care?

Luckily for me, there was no wars on when I was enlisted and by the time they got rolling I was too old and too fat to go back in. I gave my country seven years of my life and managed to make it out in one piece. I consider myself extremely lucky. Many many of my friends carry scars inside and out from their service.

Veterans are not getting a fair shake in this country, either. There was a time not so many years ago when being a veteran was something that everyone could be proud of. A man in uniform was honored and revered as a hero. When we lost that, we lost a big piece of our national pride.

It's time for America to stop looking out for the rest of the world and start looking after itself. This is our home and no other country is going to step in and say "Wow. Things are looking a little rough there. Here's a few billion dollars in aid. Will that help?" Even our supposed allies aren't going to do that.

Let's stay home for the next ten years and fix some of the problems in our own house. Let the rest of the world tend to their own knitting for awhile.

Thank you.

10-45!

In CO speak, (for those of you who don't know already) 10-45 means "On the way" or "In transit" to whatever location. If someone calls me on my way in and asks for my 10-20 (my location) I will reply "I am 10-45 the Hive".

It seems like there is always somebody going somewhere in the prison. Especially the inmates. They are either going where they want to go or going where they are supposed to go. It depends on the time of day. But there is very little time during any day when they are all locked down in their cells and accounted for all at the same time.

It sounds like a dicey way to run a prison, I know. But it usually works out. Not too many of them have wandered off.

When I come in most afternoons there are "porters" (read inmates) running around all over the place outside the fence. There are porters that work up front in the front desk/ admin building/ parking lot area cleaning offices and emptying trash and picking up trash and repainting the lines in the parking lot and there are porters that work down in the training building doing pretty much the same thing and there are porters that work with outside maintenance changing the lights on the perimeter and mowing the lawns. There are also numerous outside work crews that go out with the highway department and other people. There are also inmates that go out with the laundry truck drivers to pick up and deliver laundry from the places all over that we have bulk laundry contracts from.

For the most part, these inmates have shown that they are at least temporarily trustworthy and can do work outside the fence unsupervised. And many of them, for the most part, are unsupervised. We just do not have the staff to keep a physical eye on every single one of them every minute of the day.

Heck, we don't have enough resources to watch them 24-7 on the inside let alone outside.

So, on occasion, as you may guess, one of them does something stupid. Like today for example. One of the outside porters got on one of the little "gator" utv golfcart things and disappears for over an hour. I guess he couldn't come up with a good story about where he had been so now he's sitting in the dry cell waiting to see if he was trying to smuggle something in. Look back for a post about the dry cell for the whole process there. It's a load of laughs.

Is there a solution to this problem? Well, no. We can either hire staff to do the trash work outside that the inmates are doing (which isn't going to happen) or outfit them with high-tech tracking devices so we can keep track of them wherever they are (which isn't going to happen either) or just hope that nothing bad happens and keep going the way we are (which is probably going to happen).

All we can do is stay alert and keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. At least somebody noticed that this joker was missing.

And whether or not numbnuts manages to produce anything contraband-wise or not, I'm sure we will be having him down in the Hive for a good long time. And when he gets out he will have to find a job inside the fence from now on.

Job security.

Shocking Developments

Well, I went. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I did anyway. Was feeling a bit better this morning but I think I got a little overheated and over-exerted myself.

Got those little sparkly things in my eyes you get right before you pass out.

That wasn't cool.

Made me feel weak and I hate that. I'm not overly macho, but I hate being the weak link in the chain. It pisses me off.

I didn't know that they were going to actually zap us with the stun shield, either. That wasn't as bead as I thought it was going to be. Working in neon shops I actually got stronger shocks from the transformers for signs than I did from that thing.

The shield was higher voltage than your average neon transformer (75,000 v as compared to 15,000 to 25,000 v) but lower amperage ( 3ma opposed to 30ma for neon). I'm not exactly clear on how that works. I'm no electrical engineer.

The shield will make you jump and want to get away or do whatever it takes to make it to stop. It's very uncomfortable and not something I would want to go through willingly. After a few seconds it made your muscles want to seize up. Getting hit with a neon transformer will almost make you pee on yourself. Even if you are expecting it.

Anyway, I survived. Got zapped four or five times and did a few mock movement teams. They made me sit out the last half an hour of the class, tho. Apparently I went fairly white. Dang.

I imagine I will go back to work tomorrow. As long as I try not to overdo it, I should be fine. There's always the chance I will have to do something crazy, but that's the chance you take.

Time will tell.