DannyBoyinExile

By policy, all TDCJ inmates can receive a two-hour visit, once every weekend. However, by another TDCJ policy, special consideration will be given to friends and family who travel over 250 miles to visit their loved ones.
In that situation, the visitors are eligible to receive an “extended visit”, which means that their visit can last up to FOUR hours – and they can have one on Saturday AND Sunday, to make up for all the distance they had to travel.
The TDCJ Administration is generally very helpful to these long-distance visitors, and will go out of their way to accommodate them. All they have to do is contact the unit, notify them when they’re coming (and from how far) and schedule the visit in advance, so that there won’t be any problems with overcrowding on a particular weekend. (The LAST thing the administration wants to do is tell your 80 year-old grandmother, who just flew a thousand miles, that she can’t see you after all, because too many visitors showed up that weekend…)
Inmates can have an extended visit one weekend per month – and the administration here has never failed to be as helpful as they could be to my wife, when she scheduled them.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that there won’t be mishaps from time to time. There have been a few instances when, halfway through our visit, the guard approached us and said, “You have five minutes left.”
Before my wife could get irate (in a way that only a Crazy German Girl can!), I quickly stepped in and explained that we were in the midst of an extended visit, which was approved and scheduled by the administration – and now they owed US an extra five minutes for the interruption! (just kidding) They will always call and check, and the situation is generally resolved in a matter of minutes.
Another time, I had an extended visit scheduled for 1pm – and at 1:30pm I was still waiting to be let out of my cell! My wife is from Germany, where people are so punctual that if they’re scheduled to arrive at your house for dinner at 7:00, and get there at 6:45 – they’ll sit in your driveway talking on the phone until EXACTLY 7pm, when they were supposed to get there! So she didn’t at all accept their explanations for why I was so late for our visit, after she flew 7,000 miles to get here. But I DID get there, and made the mistake of jokingly asking her why SHE was late – which I’ll never do again! 🙂
My visit may have been late, but I still got it, and it still lasted the entire four hours – even if it did start a little later than scheduled.
There will be times, even after I’m released, when mistakes will be made, schedules won’t be followed, and some things may be cancelled altogether. So it’s good practice for me to deal with them patiently, without losing my composure or making the situation any more unpleasant than it has to be. If I can do that, not only will I help myself – I may even be able to help help someone else, and keep THEM from overreacting. It’s not always easy to be polite to someone, when you’re feeling wronged in some way. But it gets easier with practice, if you’re willing to try it. (Being polite, I mean, not wronging someone!) Some people look for reasons to be nice to someone, and some people look for reasons NOT to be nice to someone – and I know which one I’d rather be. So says DannyBoy.