DannyBoyinExile

There are many “unofficial” things that are taught and learned by the inmates of TDCJ. I don’t mean things such as how to make meth, get away with a robbery, or commit the perfect scam. All of those things are idiotic – and clearly didn’t work out very well for the guy trying to explain it to someone else!
For example, if you’re patient and intelligent (granted, not everyone in TDCJ is!), you can really sharpen your people skills, as well as your conflict resolution skills. These will always be put to the test around here, because you may have polished your social skills to a glossy sheen – but that doesn’t mean the next idiot has, and you still have to get along with him.
Just the other day, I’m at work in the laundry, and go to the back gate with another guy to pick up the buggies filled with dirty clothes from the trusty camp, which we wash, dry, and return every day. It’s just me and him (and the CO escorting us), so we were dismayed to find THREE buggies waiting on us. It may seem like common sense to get the CO to push the extra one – but that would be uncommon, indeed.
What we did was empty one of them, by piling its contents atop the other two – and we MANHANDLED it (the buggies, I mean, not the CO) back to the laundry. My coworker makes it to the door first, with me in hot pursuit – when my buggy meets resistance that isn’t supposed to be there.
Before I can say WTF?, the other guy starts SCREAMING at me. “HEY! You need to watch where the eff you’re going!”
If I’d witnessed him yelling at his KIDS like that, I’d have been offended – and he damn sure wasn’t gonna yell at ME like that!
I’m like, “First of all, you KNOW we’ve got it piled up so high, I can’t see. And why would you just STOP, right inside the door, when you know I’m right behind you?”
I mean, I know the guy was tired and frustrated – but I was, too. As he continued his tirade about how it was my fault, I told him quite clearly that he needed to find some other dude to yell at, because I wasn’t the one.
Then he had the audacity to say that he’ll knock me out! No, sir. I was like, “You’ve got that MESSED up. As a matter of fact – EFF you!” (of course, my language then wasn’t nearly as polite as I just made it.)
The guy is like, “Come on over here to the back.” In TDCJ, when someone challenges you to a fight, he is “calling you out”. Which is exactly what he just did, by the way. You can either rise to the occasion, or make yourself look really bad – and there’s no question which option I would take. In the words of John Wayne: sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
So I go to the place he intended – and HE doesn’t show up. I wait a few moments and walk out, and see him coming from the bathroom. So I go BACK to the place he intended. He just sat on a bench and ignored me. Which wasn’t a bad thing, by any means. I mean, the COs heard the whole thing, so they KNOW what’s going on. We surely would’ve gone straight to lockup for fighting – but he should’ve thought about that before he called me out!
I was just defending myself, so I was surprised when they sent ME home, and told me I needed to cool off! I’m like, “I’m fine! He’s the one who called ME out. What was I supposed to do?”
Well, we didn’t get into a fight. I went home (from work, unfortunately, not prison!) and put the incident out of my mind until they felt they didn’t have to worry about us getting into it again. Then it was back to work.
Perhaps I could’ve handled the incident better – but not MUCH better. I didn’t start any trouble I just stood up for myself. And even though we didn’t fight, the whole laundry (and then the entire Wynne Unit) was talking about how he called me out, then HE wouldn’t fight. So I still shined, as I tend to do. =-) The thing is, we HAVE to sharpen our people skills in here. Because there will always be times when the people we encounter WON’T be very polite, or diplomatic, towards us. At those times, it’s especially important to be the guy who can resolve problems, and not just make them worse. That may be harder to do in prison – but if we can master it here, we should have no problem doing so in the free world. Things like patience, politeness, and problem-solving can become habits like anything else. We just need to practice them, until they do. So says DannyBoy