DannyBoyinExile

The lockdown may not be over with on the Wynne Unit, but clearly my vacation is, because as soon as they finished searching my wing – it was back to work. I could almost hear the hallway sighing with relief as I swept up the myriad pieces of trash, emptied the trashcans, sanitized the desk, and mopped the floor – all of which hadn’t been done in over a week. I even had a Welcome Back to Work moment, when the guys on medium custody (G4 status, in modern terminology) decided to throw a temper tantrum and flood the run.
In today’s TDCJ, flooding is a common form of rebellion. An inmate will get mad at a guard for whatever reason, or simply want to force them to call a supervisor to the wing – so he will stuff a towel (or even an empty bottle of some sort) into the hole in his toilet, and flush it approximately a thousand times. This will first flood HIS cell, then the entire run. If he happens to live upstairs (sadly, this idiot did), the water will then cascade to the lower floors, in a waterfall of dirty water.
This problem is much worse on the older units (such as this one!), because at the time they were built, there was no such thing as an inmate deliberately flooding the run – so there was no apparent need for drains to be included in their plans, to push the water into. Back in those days, inmates literally ran the unit – albeit for the guards – so the certainty that you would get beat half to death was a good deterrent against those types of shenanigans. Today, not so much.
Without drains, I had to clean up the water the old fashioned way: Saturate a mop with water. Wring it out. Repeat. (About a million times.) It took a few hours, and at least ten trips to empty the mop bucket, but I finally got the run dried, then the dayroom. Honestly, it needed a good cleaning, anyway – I just wasn’t planning to be the (unlucky) guy to do it.
That’s why I make the big bucks, though, or at least that’s why I’m the guy they will come looking for, when things like this happen. It’s by no means fun to stand in toilet water for hours, while I clean up someone else’s mess. But it IS kinda cool to be respected as a worker, and be able to move around while everyone else is locked in their cells. I try to always keep a good attitude, and keep my complaints to myself, because that’s part of being a good worker – which is just part of being a good dude, period. Even in prison, where I can’t control very many things, if I can just control MYSELF, I can always improve my situation. So says DannyBoy.