A few of my favorite things.

There aren’t many things that I really love about my job. I mean I like my job, but there are few things that are actually great about it. Who likes dealing with unruly adult-toddlers all day? (show of hands, please)
I do like some aspects of my job though. Not everything is “boo-hoo Joel”. There are a couple of things that I really look forward to.
One of my favorite things is shooting. I don’t ever get to shoot while I am off the job, but every six months or so, we all go out to the range and shoot a qualification course. Now, I am not the best shooter; I don’t hit everything I aim at every time, but I am alright. Our trainers are two Sgts that have special training, and they seem to have fun setting up the range and thinking of new things for us to do.
Today was “Qual day”, so I had a blast. I passed with little fanfare. Not as good as I thought I was going to do, but not failing. Plus, we don’t get paid any more to get a high score anyway, so as long as I pass I have fun. This time, one of our target groups was golf balls hanging from ropes. It was a “par 5″. 5 golf balls, 5 bullets. My kind of golf, but I only hit one. I just wish I had more time out there. If we were able to train more often, I might just become a golfer.
One of my other favorite things in my job is letting people go when their time is up. There is nothing like the look on someones face after they are told to “roll it up”. Now, I know that jail is a revolving door, and that a large number of releases will eventually end up in jail again. But for that one brief moment, they believe that things will be different, they believe that this is the last time, and that “this time” they will be able to make it work. I get a kick out of that. It makes me feel good to be able to give someones freedom back. Besides, they earned it.
So after all is said and done, there are a couple of things that I like about my job. Who would’ve thought?

Us and them

There is a man in jail right now who is going to sue us all. He is going to own the county, and he will fire us all. There is a woman who is from the Central Intelligence Agency, and is eagerly awaiting a visit from the President. There is a man living with AIDS who, by all statistical rights, should not be alive. There is a man who is on trial for his 3rd strike, fighting for his freedom. There is a man sobering up to the DUI charge he received the night prior. There is a woman writing a letter to her children trying to explain why she is in jail “this time”. There is a man wondering if his family is going to show up at visiting time. There is a man thinking of ways to get out of jail. There is a man thinking of ways to score more dope when he leaves.

Then there’s me.

Sometimes I think that the only thing that separates me from most of them, is one or two really dumb decisions. We both feel, we both bleed, we both have wants and needs. There are many things that we have in common, but the only one that counts for now, is the fact that we are both in jail. I am on my side, and they are on theirs.
I think I like this side better.

Making headlines today….

I usually don’t just link to other people’s stuff as a post, but this was too moving to pass up.
Read about what I am talking about: HERE

A Canine Last Goodbye

I remember a poem that Jimmy Stewart wrote (yes, THAT Jimmy Stewart), and once read on ‘The Late Show with Johnny Carson’. It’s called “Bo” (or “Beau”), and it seems fitting to show here.Here’s my story:
When I was just a boy, our house was in the woods. It was a nice home and we had nice things, but one of the things I remember the most is my dog, Lizzie. Lizzie was a German short-hair. I don’t really remember her as a puppy, we got her when she was full grown. She was still a puppy, but in a grown-dog body. We adopted her from a neighbor who had taken Lizzie’s brother and her when they were pups.
She was dark brown and had a stub tail, as all German short-hairs do. She was a good dog, always good with us kids. Never mean, and rarely very brave. Whenever someone would come up our driveway, she would scamper to the back yard and bark from there until we coaxed her back to the front. Sort of a passive-aggressive doggy personality.
One day, we heard some whining coming from our back deck. When we went to check out the problem, we saw Lizzie sitting at the back door. Her snout was full of porcupine barbs. Some were barely sticking in, and others were fully through her snout. I am sure they ALL hurt. We were all worried about our dog, but she didn’t seem afraid of us. Our uncle told us that he could probably remove them, but if Lizzie was going to “freak out”, we were going to have to take him to the vet (over an hour away). Well, my uncle got some pliers and began the delicate procedure. Lizzie didn’t yelp, or pull away once. She just laid down and let us pull the barbs out, one by one. She was obviously in pain, but she trusted us to take care of her, even if it hurt her to do so.
She was sore for a couple of days afterwards, but no worse for the wear. I think we were all amazed by her, and we learned to love her just a little more.
She and I would play in the woods for hours with my sisters. She was always nearby, and came whenever we called. She would endure the pulling of the ears, and the tackles and all of the other things that kids put dogs through. She was a good dog, a good good dog. She was part of our family.
Fast forward 10 years, and I am away at college. Lizzie has grown old and blind. With a fully grey beard, she is severely arthritic and seems to get scared easily. She is becoming dangerous. When anyone new comes to the house, she becomes very aggressive and even lunges at a couple of delivery men.
She was in pain then. We had moved, and she no longer had the freedom she once enjoyed. She could no longer go on her runs; even if she wanted to, she didn’t have it in her anymore. Lizzie started getting seizures too. She would just plop over and start shaking uncontrollably. It was sad. My poor dog was slowly dying, I was told.
One day after classes, I got a call from my mom. She told me that dad had taken Lizzie to the humane society to be euthanized. I was expecting it. I knew that it was going to have to happen sooner or later, but it was probably easier that I wasn’t home. I felt bad for my dad though. It was his dog too. I was sad, but it didn’t really crush me. I was in college after all, and there are plenty of other things to occupy one’s mind while in college.
Quickly, I forgot about my late friend, or so I had thought.
About a week after the call from my mom, I awoke from a dream, with a tear soaked pillow. Lizzie was still young and happy. With perfect eyesight and no arthritis, we played and ran, and rolled around on the ground like we did when I was a boy. It was as if she was saying goodbye. One last game, one last romp, one last lick on the face. I get a little choked up just thinking about it now. Thanks again old girl.

How to tackle sleep and trees. (Or – How I kept myself awake during my weekend.)

I am just finishing my first grave yard weekend, and I have to say that it’s been nice. Work wasn’t at all bad this week, but (as I have said 100 times before) any time away from work is good time.
This week, I have had my sister and her son here from LasVegas. I wanted to hang out with her and my new baby nephew, so I decided to stay up all day on my Friday. That means that after I worked from midnight to 8am, I didn’t sleep, but stayed up and waited to sleep until normal sleep time. After all was said and done, I had stayed up for about 30 hours. Good? Bad? You Decide.

After work, around 2pm, I started to feel a bit sleepy and actually a bit drunk. So, like any good drunk man, I decided to destroy something. I took my chainsaw out to the backyard and cut down two trees. OK, so only one fell, but the other will probably go during some heavy winds. The one that is still up was leaning onto another tree to begin with, so with some help from good ol’ mutha nature, I expect my handy work to pay off in the future. It isn’t leaning towards anything and it isn’t anywhere that the kids would go, so I am not afraid of hurting somebody. I did try to get it down by pulling it with my jeep. (Here’s a pic of my son and I working on the jeep.) It didn’t work though, because I don’t have off-road wheels and a jeep isn’t exactly heavy. Mostly, I just made some mud holes and spun out a lot. It was good dirty fun, and I felt like a “manly-man” when I was finished. For a geek-techie like me, that’s saying something.

After my stint in the “forest”, I decided to come back inside and hang out with the family.
At around midnight I decided to call it a day (in actuality I was calling it 2 days) and got a good 9 hours of sleep. It was nice. I felt tired when I woke up, but not terribly. I am just wondering if I would feel better or worse if I had stayed on my normal graveyard sleep schedule. It was pretty easy staying up THIS time, but sometimes I get where I can’t even talk straight, let alone operate a chainsaw.
If I am able to keep my wits, I would like to keep staying up, because I feel like I get more time off and more time with my family. I just don’t want them to suffer if I become useless. I do know that if it gets too bad, my wife will brief me, and promptly order me to bed.
God, I love that woman.

Holy Graveyard, Batman!

Ahhhhhhh….
Graveyard is finally here. I must say that so far (2 days) it is wonderful. I don’t mind the other shifts, but I always look forward to graveyard. My wife doesn’t, but I certainly do.
I have sleeping problems. Graveyard is nice because I am able to sleep without a ton of drugs to help. I took Ambien while I was on swing shift, but that stopped working after about a week. Prior to that, I was taking something else, and that stopped working as well. It’s weird, because I found myself SO tired, but completely unable to actually sleep. I could lay in bed for hours and hours, not moving, not tossing or turning, just awake. You can imagine, it was maddening. Some of my co-workers were incredulous at my predicament, because they were able to go home and be asleep 15 minutes after they walked through their front door. You always take for granted the things that come easy.
Compared to other shifts, graveyard is heaven. We have to do extra rounds throughout the night to check on the inmates, but even that isn’t a big deal. All inmate issues are dealt with on other shifts, so unless someone is going to get into a fight or is deathly ill, it waits until morning. That isn’t to say that we aren’t asked to do things, it’s just that we don’t do it.

Graveyard is sleep time for the inmates, and if it wasn’t important enough to get taken care of during the day prior, then it can usually wait another shift.

We do actually do some work though. We release inmates if their time is up. We book in an exceptional amount of people during graveyard. If an inmate has charges in another county, we get them ready for transport, and we get all of the transports ready for prison. We serve breakfast in the morning. But I do have to admit, even with the work we do on graveyard, it is exponentially less than the other shifts.
Of course, just like anything else, not everyone likes what I like. (stupid people) There are people who HATE this shift. Normally this is directly tied to sleep; I can understand that frustration. My wife hates graveyard too. She feels like she is able to see me less, but she forgets about swing shift, where I would stay up until 3, or 4, or 5, and then sleep until 1pm. Then I would leave for work at 4. Now, at least I only sleep until 3. I take a couple of hours to “warm up to the world”, but she still gets more hours per day with me than she did on swings.
Oh, well. She only has to put up with it for three months and then I will go to day shift. Day shift, HUMBUG! Every one’s awake, court, radio traffic up the wazoo, attorney visits, and all of the other lovely things that come with day shift. Up at 7, home by 4, sleep by 2 (hopefully). The three month countdown begins now.
The only thing that I have found that I don’t like, is that I post less. On swing shift, I would post when I was awake at night. It was easier to post when there was nothing else to do, so I found myself posting more regularly. Now, I am afraid that my writing will suffer due to my new found ability to sleep. I guess, we will just have to wait and see.

There’s a guy bleeding in here…

That’s the call control got last night at about 9:30 pm.
We were already dealing with a female at booking who just wasn’t cooperating with anyone. She was being read her Miranda Rights by a Sheriff’s Deputy, but the whole time she was yelling at him. Lot’s o’ fun.
I get a call, on the phone, from our control room officer who says that I should probably go over to the lock-down unit and take a couple of officers with me. He tells me that a guy is banging on the cell door, and seems very upset. I go and get some gloves and tell everyone that we need to check out the cell. We get to the outer door of the unit and, over the radio, we hear control call for officers AND medical to the cell.
When we get to the cell, there’s a guy at the door and he is bleeding from his mouth. Hmmmm. There are only a couple of things that can cause that. One is internal medical problems, one is self-mutilation, and another is an angry cell-mate.
We opened the door and took the bleeding guy out, and then I went in to talk to the cell-mate. He was calmly sitting on the floor like nothing had happened.

Me: “Did you pop him?”
Him: “Yes”
Me: “Are you alright?”
Him: “Ya.”
Me: “Let me take a look at your knuckles”
I see that he has a gash in his knuckles and it’s a bleeder.
Me: Let’s have medical look at that, ok?”
Him: “Ya, it hurts.”
Me: “That’s odd”
Him: “hehe”

So medical looks at him, and she determines that both inmates are going to need stitches. Hospital here we come. Luckily, we weren’t terribly busy (sans angry female at booking still), so another officer and myself took them to the hospital. (separate vehicles, of course)
At the hospital, it was pretty busy. We were told that there were a couple of critical patients that were being tended to, so we had to wait in the waiting room. I had the other officer sit far away from me and my guy, so they wouldn’t try anything on each other.
It’s weird being in a waiting room with a shackled inmate. Everyone looks at you, and nobody wants to sit next to you. You can hear little kids asking their parents about the chains on the inmate, and the parents usually just tell them to not talk about it. We didn’t have to wait more than 10 minutes, so at least that was in my , and their, favor.
After we got back to an actual room, I started to question my guy about the rest of his side of the story.

Me: “So, what started all of this?”
Him: “He just went off, and started freaking out?”
Me: “What got him all fired up”
Him: “I don’t know, he just started banging on the door and then turned and kicked my mattress [on the floor], and asked me ‘You want some of this?’”
Me: “What was he freaking out about?”
Him: “He was mad that he wasn’t in the medical unit, and wanted to be moved back.”
Me: “So, what did you do?”
Him: “I took off my socks, rolled up my pants, and stood up. He turned around to me again, and I hit him.”
Me: “What did he do?”
Him: “He fell to the floor and started bleeding. I threw him a towel, and I washed my hands off in the sink. Then I got on the [intercom] and told the officer that there was someone bleeding.”
Me: “How long after you called did it take for us to get there?”
Him: “I think you were already in the unit by the time I called.”

I ended up talking a bit more with this inmate about the fight, and I told him that he should of gotten on the intercom before he hit him, so we could have removed him and evaded this whole thing completely. Mostly though, he was worried about new charges and if hitting the guy was going to hurt his chances to move out of the lock-down tank. He will probably be disappointed on both accounts.
Later, I was able to talk to the other officer and found out the part of the story my guy had left out.
The day before, they had gotten into an argument, and it didn’t get resolved, so there was tension. The night of the fight, my guy had yelled at the other guy for flipping the pages of his book to loudly. The other guy jumped out of his bed and told him that they should “settle this once and for all”. My guy didn’t want to fight, and that made the other guy mad, so he started banging on the door and freaking out. After that, their stories are pretty much the same.
I just wish that we had been able to be aware of the situation about 2 minutes earlier. We could have separated them, and none of this would have happened.
At least it wouldn’t have happened that night.