DannyBoyinExile

They say that time flies when you’re having fun, and that seems to be true. But it certainly doesn’t fly when you’re NOT having fun.
The last part of a lockdown is typically the worst. (Just like the fourth quarter is typically the worst, for a Dallas Cowboys fan!) (just kidding) After almost two weeks, we’re pretty well sick of it. You come to a point where you’ve slept all you can, you’re tired of reading, and you find yourself READY to get back to the job you couldn’t wait to get away from just a few weeks before.
Not to mention the fact that, as you spend more days on lockdown, the unit starts to run out of the ingredients they use to make sack meals with – so they start getting progressively skimpier. The standard PBJ and meat sandwich dwindles to PBJ between pancakes, instead of bread, and the meat becomes approximately a teaspoon of hamburger meat, sandwiched between two corn tortillas! Well, it didn’t kill me, so I hope it made me stronger. You can complain about the food, whether on OR off lockdown – and many people do – but one thing is certain: of all the inmates who have died in TDCJ, I’m pretty sure that NONE of them starved to death. Most of us could afford to lose a few pounds, truth be told.
To make matters worse, the entire Securus tablet network went kaput. So we were literally in the Stone Age again, having flashbacks to how it used to be, on a REAL lockdown. No games, no music, no emails. We couldn’t even use the phones to call our loved ones. We were completely incommunicado, with no way to even tell anyone about the problem. People yelled and screamed, slapped their tablets, and kicked their doors (one guy actually threw his tablet over the run!), but we couldn’t even enter our TDCJ numbers to ACTIVATE them. One guy discovered that if he ran his battery all the way down to 0%, where it would automatically turn off – then plugged in his charger, it would automatically boot up again, and he could use it. (He clearly had too much time on his hands, without a tablet in them!) Several people followed the same procedure, and it worked for them, as well. Alas, my tablet was almost fully charged at the time, so I had no way to run the battery down without being able to turn it on. I’ve lived through quite a few lockdowns with no tablet (while eating skimpy sack meals!), and none of them has killed me yet, so I knew that this one, too, would pass.
They finally finished searching the unit, and it wasn’t long at all until I was summoned to work again. (The hallway waits for no man!) By Thanksgiving we were back to normal, and even had the traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
The show goes on, and life goes on, even in prison. And even here, we have many things to be thankful for – if we’d only look for them. So says DannyBoy.