Getting Out of the Cleaning Business

Prison jobs are generally unpleasant, unpaid affairs. Kitchen work, groundskeeping, and janitorial duties are the usual categories it falls under. I've done a little of each.

For the last two years, I cleaned the offices of ERDCC's administrative-segregation unit. My responsibilities were to empty trash cans, sweep and mop, shred papers, occasionally file away document folders, and clean one overused – not to say abused – employee restroom. The schedule was two or three hours a day, five days a week. I was paid only $20 a month, but it still beat working eight-hour shifts in the kitchen and having no time for myself.

My friend and neighbor Luke, who maintains the system that controls ERDCC's seven in-house movie, series, and information channels, offered me a job with him about a year ago. Experience with Windows computers was a must. Working knowledge of JavaScript helped. The only catch was that I had to wait for one of Luke's three subordinates to leave. Two were short-timers and bound to go at any time, but "any time" in prison terms is ambiguous. Those guys could be around for a month as easily as for a year or two.

This was the thinking, anyway, until mass transfers last week removed hundreds of low-level prisoners from the ERDCC population. One of Luke's coworkers disappeared in the process. His loss was my gain. Last Thursday, I was paged to the recreation department and given a tour of the media room: workstations, drive arrays, DVD library, the works. This was a formality; the staff had already vetted me. All that was left was the paperwork.

A set of doors in the gym opens into the Learning Center, a large room lined with TVs, where prisoners can watch therapeutic and educational videos during their recreation times. On one side of the Learning Center stands a grated metal gate. Someone hung a sign there: The answer to your question is NO. Tucked beyond it are two small, warm rooms of computer equipment – my new place of employ.

Monday was Day One. Sitting at a keyboard, being gently embraced by two curved 24-inch monitors, felt weird in the best possible way. Clicking my way around and typing experimental commands in the unfamiliar database was like blowing dust off some forgotten machine. My brain hadn't worked like this in nineteen years. I started out tentatively, as wobbly as a kid on his first bicycle. Luke had me input TV listings for our scrolling daily TV-channel guide. I made good enough time with that, they assigned me other tasks.

By Day Two I was digging into my bag of power-user tools. I even showed Luke a trick that he hadn't known existed. It was a good day. The first, I suspect, of many. The pay's better, the work's mentally stimulating, and the environment's fun. Best of all: I don't have to clean someone else's toilet.