Thinking Too Fast

I have a love/hate relationship going with my Wednesdays. It's my comm room day, as you may know.

I dig the comm room because there is usually very little work involved. Note the italics there. Toady there was a utility up there when I relieved and it didn't take me too long to notice that things were screwed up. It took a little bit later to fully understand how screwed up they were.

It was nothing major, mind you. Just little stuff that kept throwing me off.

There were maybe half a dozen radios in the wrong spots. 114 was in 141. 112 and 113 were reversed. 122 was in 222's spot. Things like that. They just kept throwing me off. Two of the key tabs got misplaced, so I had radios out and didn't know who had them so I had to go back through the sign out sheet page by page and try to read peoples handwriting. I got halfway through and could not find one radio anywhere. It was really really pissing me off.

Luckily for me, Sgt Puddle likes me and he came up to help. And a fresh set of eyes showed me where the mistake was. Made me feel like a dope. I got agitated and was thinking too fast and just couldn't see it.

Pfui. It made me say "Snap" a whole lot.

There was another staff assault down in the Hive today on day shift. Maybe the fifth or sixth one in two weeks, I think.

That little wobblehead Shmelvin (the one that says he's a CIA assassin and a black belt in karate, etc) was down there and played the unresponsive game. Just layed on the bunk and wouldn't move or respond.

So when they went in to make sure he was still alive, he started kicking and struck three staff with his feet before they could get him restrained. One hurt his wrist and had to go get an x-ray.

Then when they wrote him the violations he blamed it all on his "mental illness" and claimed he didn't know what he was doing.

The little jagoff doesn't have a mental illness as far as I'm concerned. His problems are all emotional. He does this stupid crap for attention. That's what got him in prison in the first place. Acting like a fool for the attention.

I don't think he's realized it yet, but he crossed a line that there is no going back from. He hurt a CO. Now every staff member here is going to switch from treating him like he's just a childish fool to treating him like he's a semi-dangerous snaphole. And the next time he even twitches towards anybody he's going to get slammed and hard. We used to just pretty much ignore him and his stupid little games.

Now he is the enemy and will be treated with extreme prejudice.

Personally, I hope he learns that lesson sooner than later.

Because if they press the charges, we're going to be stuck with his little punk butt for another 15-20 years.

Hopefully I will be long gone before they ever even think about letting him out again.

Okay, I'm getting myself all worked up again. Time to decompress and go to sleep.

Let's be careful out there.

Walk

I got lucky and they stuck me on the yard today. Just me and Goosey and Sgt Bumblebee. That turned out all right. I spent most of the night walking. Didn't mind it so much. We had two carts but there were some issues.

When we took from days they told us that maintenance had fixed the brakes on one of our carts. That was a good thing because that sucker took half the yard to stop before. We were considering buying an anchor or just finding a big rock on a rope to toss out when we needed to stop.

I'm actually surprised that nobody had gotten run over by that cart. Or that it hadn't rolled off down a hill by itself and burst into flames.

Okay, it's an electric golf cart and probably wouldn't burst into flames. But the way this place is run and the way things get jury rigged around here it would not surprise me in the least.

It turns out that instead of sticking on new brake pads, they just cranked down on the cable as tight as they could get it. It's so tight the brakes are half on before you even touch the pedal. So the motor is fighting gravity and the brakes at the same time. Burns up a full battery charge real quick.

And if you do happen to step on the brake pedal it immediately locks up the back wheels so you slide to a stop.

Plus it turns out that one of those freaking geniuses down in the maintenance shop just hand tightened the lug nuts on the drivers side wheel. It damn near came off while Bumblebee was driving down to the wobblehead house.

I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. He's a little excitable.

When I first signed on with the department, I wanted to work in maintenance. Of course I wasn't one of the founding fathers of this county and I don't drink beer with any of the movers and shakers here so I didn't get the job.

I became a CO instead. Now I'm pretty glad about it.

Even the bad stuff people say about me couldn't be half as bad as some of the stuff I have heard said about maintenance. That would really make me feel horrible if people talked that bad about me.

I have heard their motto is: "We aren't fast, but we're half-fast."

And I can sure believe it.

Just Not Right

Some things are just not right. Where you just want to slap somebody upside the head and say "What the snap were you thinking???"

Putting me in the control center is one of those things.

I haven't been up there since they put the new panels in and I didn't have a clue what to do. I think I opened the wrong thing about thirty times and I know I hit the "clean screen" button and froze up my screen at least four times.

Fortunately I didn't do anything monumentally stupid.

And luckily for all of us Vinnie and Sgt Puddle showed up for work or we would all have been screwed.

I spent the first hour trying to figure out the dang panels and wanting to chew my own foot off.

I spent a good part of the next seven hours watching those two try to poison themselves with Pixie Sticks.

That wasn't pretty at all. They were like preteens with a platinum Visa card in Willy Wonka's factory.

I will probably never eat a Pixie Stick again and I didn't even have any.

Not to say we didn't have a good time. Once I stopped stressing out about the panels, anyway. We spent a good amount of time talking about songs and movies and books. We have alot of the same tastes.

Which worries me just a little sometimes.

But I think it worries them too, so it all works out.

I think I would have enjoyed it more if there wasn't so many things to screw up. But you can really screw up in the control center and I don't want any part of that mess. Give me one of those simple straightforward "Talk him down or thump him" situations every time.

My brain can handle those better.

Give me 200 inmates to account for at one time and in one house. Not 3000 of them scattered all over the place.

No thank you.

LOL

For once somebody did something funny on the radio and it was neither me nor St Francis.

I'm not going to say his name to protect the innocent. Even all of the nicknames I could come up with would give it away, so I'll just say "Officer X" and leave it at that.

X is a pretty good guy. A little new, but that wears off quickly in our little department. There's no in between, it seems. You are either new or you've been here forever.

I just contradicted myself. Imagine that.

At any rate (he continued, totally ignoring his contradiction) X was somewhere. I don't rightly recall which house he was in. I was up in the 1 house bubble with Miz Maybe and Yamaha when we hear X on the radio telling someone to go to channel two.

Yamaha catches it first and switches his radio over, just like almost everybody else on the camp.

X comes over the radio on channel two and says "Yeah, can you send somebody down here? I'm down in the bathroom and I can't get out."

Whoever it was he was calling says "Whaaaaaat?" and you can hear laughing in the background.

He comes back and says "I'm stuck in the bathroom and the door won't unlock!"

We of course lost it right then and there. It's a good thing nothing else happened for the next ten minutes or so because we would have been completely useless we were laughing so hard.

Poor X.

The next time I see him I'm going to have to shake his hand.

He made what was shaping up to be a pretty boring night worth while.

I Don't Want To Be A Backseat Driver

Sounds like things are heating up again down in the Hive. At least with one knucklehead, anyway. He spit on Windows the other night and this evening he threw a cup of an "unknown substance" that he claimed to be a bodily fluid on LB, Drew and another officer.

Why he is still in one piece I do not know. I wasn't there. By my own choice. I elected to get out of there while I could.

But as soon as I heard about the incident (third hand, of course) my mind was full of "Well, I would have...." and " They should have...." and "Why didn't anybody..."

And I stopped myself. That was the same crap I used to get from the lieutenants and captains every time I got in a use of force. Not gonna go there.

Once I figured out that everyone was okay, then I just left it alone. It's their baby now and most of the time I am half a camp away.

Of course if they call for help, I'm going to be on my way and you better clear the sidewalks because I don't stop or maneuver very well when I get to running.

I'd love to be on point when somebody finally decides this punk needs a lesson taught to him. The way he's going I'm sure it will come.

That is one good thing about not being assigned to the Hive anymore. If they decide to send in a team with or without the shield, I'm available. My day will come. If not with this knucklehead, then with the next one.

On the down side of this day, it was Peggy Sues last day and I didn't get a chance to see her off to her new job. I'm sure glad she stopped yesterday and gave me a hug. Gonna miss that girl like crazy. But I'm sure she's gonna be super in the new position. And it's real warming to know she's still in our corner.

We can only get better with backup like that.

We will miss you Super Lady. Come around and visit when you can.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

I told you last week that they had scheduled me for shotgun training in the middle of my vacation. In retrospect, I should have gone just to mess with them.

But instead I went today. That was fun. It was pouring down rain when I left home so I brought my jacket and my raincoat, just to be on the safe side. Got pretty wet just going from the truck to the training building.

I was glad I wasn't in the morning class. They got soaked. By the time we got out there the rain had stopped and it turned into a sauna outside. That was freaking lovely.

It is supposed to be a three hour class. Including the range time. But they only schedule three of us for this afternoon.

Three of us.

Hey, at least they only scheduled one instructor to show up. I wouldn't have been all the surprised to see three or even four instructors.

So he stretched out the classroom time for two and a half hours and left the last half hour for actually shooting the weapon. Because if we don't actually spend three hours doing this they can't say that were are certified in shotgun training.

Seriously! We could have gotten into some really fun stuff in two and a half hours. The part of the training that we are actually required to take and understand could have been done in twenty minutes for the three of us.

But, no. All we were allowed to cover was the stuff the state makes us cover and nothing else. So we asked alot of silly "what if" questions and took some hellishly long coffee breaks.

I think it took us longer to drive to the range (about 100 yards down the road) and set up than it did for the three of us to fire off ten rounds apiece.

But hey, what am I complaining about? I got three hours of overtime for the class.

What a place.

AGAIN With The Digging???

Whilst I was gone on vacation, our erstwhile maintenance crew (ever searching for worthwhile work to do), managed to dig up the swamp out behind central security yet again.

For the seventh year in a row, so far. I'm sure they were doing it before I came to Raccoon City and I'm sure they'll still be doing it long after I depart.

They seem pretty serious about it. Or at least they have dug a serious hole. It stretches probably fifty feet from central all the way to the mattress factory. It uncovers four or five of the secondary lines running off of the main. Remember when that one blew? We thought we might have to go rent some john boats just to sign in and out of central.

Of course, the main line is somewhere four of five feet to the left of where they actually dug. I hope they know that. Or maybe they are saving it for an encore. Who knows?

I've been told that they dug this trench some time in the middle of the week I was off. Then they stretched some yellow caution tape around it and left.

And there it lays. The hole thing, as it were.

So, of course, none of the rest of us could be serious about it. Even if it is a serious hole.

Some joker put a sign on one of the mounds of dirt that reads:

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
50 POUND MOLE.
CALL EXT 262 WHEN FOUND

Some of us only dream about doing things like that. Other aspire to greatness.

I got some odd and half not-unexpected info this evening. A little birdie related to me that there are some people who are very glad that I got out of the Hive when I did, as "the rain is going to fall there soon."

That just does not sound good. If it's bad news I am glad I got out when I did, but I do worry about my crew. I hope they don't get caught in the middle of anything stupid. Hopefully they will keep their eyes and ears well open and perhaps whisper a word of advice to those without internet access.

If they **cough cough** BG **cough cough** know what I mean.

And I'm happy that there was someone who was glad I got out before the bad things happened. We don't get alot of support most days. We cling to what we get.

I still think about the place that was my home for so long. I don't particularly want to go back to being crazy all of the time but I miss the action, if you know what I mean. But I also know several people (namely KP, my wife and my doctor to name a few) that would slap me on the back of the head if I went back down there full time. It just wasn't good for me at all.

Who knows? Maybe I'll find a place I like and settle in somewhere that I don't have to run my bleep off for eight hours a day. Maybe I'll find it before our maintenance crew tunnels into the earths core and kills us all.

That would take a heap of yellow caution tape, I'm sure.