Animals and jobs.

I touched on it a bit in the last days blog. But one thing for sure about corrections work is the diversity of the jobs in a jail like GH. You can go from the wicked busy to the help me stay awake!! I've had both type of jobs over the years and I'd have to say the extremes in both area are hard to take. Barely having anything to do jobs are created just in case something goes down. Like I said before about the tower job. Boring until the sh** hits the fan. Then you go from bored to possibly shooting someone. Thank god they are mostly boring. The wicked busy jobs leave a lot of opportunities for you to mess up. Your days go by very fast but it is easy to get burned out. I'd have to say there are fewer of these wicked busy jobs compared to the bored out of my skull jobs. Most fall somewhere in between. One thing I liked about GH was someone would almost always be available to relieve you for a break. We didn't get normal breaks like most workers. We worked a straight 8 hours day along with 15 minutes of line-up(where they give you info on what's going on in the jail, etc...). If you had to open and close a gate all day it was nice to get a break from it. You were standing and turning the biggest keys I had ever seen, over and over and over. Some of the gates were electric and in that case you sat on a chair all day pushing buttons. Sometimes the CO would have a stick with a taped up tip to push the buttons with. I guess if you had to do it every day you come up with ways to keep from getting a blister on the tips of your fingers. One time the CO working one of these electric gates on the midnight shift which must have been terribly boring opened the gate for a skunk walking down the hall. Skunks were all over the jail and there were plenty of open spots for them to walk under the pass through spots in the hallways. He must have thought it was funny opening the gate for a skunk. He also must of thought it was funny to see what would happen and close the gate on it while it passed through. It took quite a while for the hallways to smell normal again. While on the subject of animals. One of the most common flying around the jail were Bats. I guess they thought it was very cave like. And they would be right!! Well someone killed one once and wrapped it up in plastic. In the Officers break area, (vending machines etc..) they had a machine for buying sandwiches and once you open the little sliding door, it's quite easy to slide in a bat wrapped up nicely in plastic. Pretty funny but a bit gross.. My friend "F" said I thought it was a pretty good deal a bat for $1.25. I guess I've got the theme for today narrowed down to animals. So I'll finish with a story about frisking a cell one day. Like I said the new jacks get to do a lot of frisking. So I'm frisking this cell and trying to check every where. It's sometime unbelievable how much an Inmate can cram into a small 6x8 cell (rough size). So it's going like most frisk go until I open one of his Tupperware bowls. It was full of Cockroaches!! I'm not sure how he was managing to keep them in while adding more to it. But there they were all moving around and I was like totally grossed out. I had never seen a Cockroach until GH. I guess everyone needs a house pet from time to time and you have to take advantage of what's around you in some cases!! I wonder if he had them all named!!