mojo263

So I'm still doing the prison thing. I'm waiting to hear back from a few other jobs I've applied before I put in a notice because I can't see myself doing this job for very long. The job itself is easy as hell, the management doesn't know its head from a hole in the ground, and really the whole thing just makes me feel like crap everyday. Oh yeah, there's also some health issues that I've developed that I need to tend to which the doctor says I need to cut stress out of my life too, but that's a different story.

( An Awkward Day. )

Is it me or does Busy work seem to be the backbone of online classes?

So today has been an fairly relaxing day. My roommate headed off to New Jersey for some national guard school, which is great because I'm now roommate-less for 30 days, woot! After ridding myself of him, I spent the rest of the afternoon doing homework for my 3 online classes, and a little homework from the other classes. A friend came over and we watched The Day The Earth Stood Still, followed by Bedtime Stories, and then The Spirit. My friend works at Blockbuster so I get movies early.

The Day the Earth Stood Still wasn't bad, it wasn't great, and it was predictable as hell. Kathy Bates was horrible, imo. Keanu Reeves was pretty much Reeves, and well the rest of it was just that.

Bedtime Stories was essentially every other Sandler flick, nothing real special to talk about there.

I made it through about 20 minutes of the Spirit until I turned it off. It went from serious drama to looney tune violence in the span of a blink of an eye. The dialogue was horrible, and the entire cast could've been shown the door. It might've been a good flick, if the writer, director and cast was different.

Outside of training class I've been in contact with several corrections officers that are linked up to do our "on the job" training when the "academy" is finished and we got to listen to several horror stories which I've been expecting. And the more and more I find about this system, the less I like about it.

( 4 days and a new reality surfaces )


So now I know why the average corrections officer lasts only six months in the system in the state of Kentucky. Especially since corrections officers in Ohio start at 35K a year, I make less than 23K, this is not a job where you'll get rich or anything of the sort, but my expectations have been completely turned on their heads. If anything I think I'll complete the training class, get my free CPR certification and have fun with some outdated weapons for a week, collect my $1400 paycheck for the month of training, and call it a day with this job.

The prison system from my vantage point is seriously screwed up, and there's no way in hell I'm going to change any of it, so I'd rather not be a part of a system that I horribly disagree with.

You know I wanted until this came out on DVD before I watched it, and thankfully I have friends that work at blockbuster and got it without paying for it. I honestly liked it. I dunno what people were complaining about, it was a pretty solid sequel in my opinion.

Though it was still a bond sequel, which is weird enough. But I enjoyed it. Casino Royale was better, but hey a good time was had while watching and in the end, that's what matters :)

So I started my new job yesterday at the Kentucky State Reformatory as a Corrections Officer and with it being finals week, I'm having trouble staying awake long enough to not regret going to sleep early. I have a 25 mile commute that really isn't all that bad, since the rush hour traffic is moving in the opposite direction I really have no trouble at all getting to work. I have about 20 - 30 minutes to myself in the morning, it's actually kinda nice.

I'm in training for the next three weeks (unless of course my guard unit complicates the matter, again) and it's really all pretty standard stuff and I'm honestly hoping I get my request to be placed in the Psych ward. We went on tour of the facility today, though we had a bit of a reality check as an Officer was attacked by 12 inmates and put in the hospital. But, all is not that bad there, it's the first time that's occurred in 5 years at that location and the Reformatory isn't a place for a lot of the harder criminals or many life imprisonment. Though it is a large pooling place for psych profiles since the closing of all the mental hospitals, apparently. We have a lot of 20 and 30 year prisoners, mixed in with a few lifers, but for all intents and purposes it's fairly calm.

I've noticed already that there are two ways to go about this job so far. The first way, and this is the way I'd like to do business, is to remember that my job is not to punish these people, the judge and jury did that by sending them there. My job is to supervise them and make sure they aren't a danger to themselves or anyone around them. I've seen some pretty good response so far if you can look these guys in the eye and just say "Hey, how's it going?" they mostly either ignore you or respond like anyone else on the street.

It's really funny how they'll taunt the ones that can't look at them, or don't look at them. Which is the second way to do business there. Don't treat them like human beings, or think that our job is to be some sort of punishment factor in their lives. Like that Officer last night (who apparently has a reputation of being a dickhead to inmates and other officers alike) who was jumped and got the ever living shit beat out of him.

I've already been approached and asked if I'd bring cigarettes into them and I could only just laugh and told him that my paycheck was better than his $50 for a pack of cigarettes. It's funny as that's something they've been preaching at us for the past two days, not to get caught up in that mess, but as soon as I told him that I'd rather keep my job, he smirked and snapped his fingers and walked off. They're going to be testing all 14 of us in this class nonstop until they find one or two that will do what they ask. It's actually pretty sad that the high turnover has more to do with Officer's being conned by the con men than it being a shitty job.

It's going to be really rough if I don't get on third shift like I want to, with going to school as much as I am, but I might take more online classes if this next quarter doesn't work out too well. All in all, I'm actually quite satisfied so far. It's an easy job, a little risky, doesn't pay all that great but hey it's steady income with bennies that aren't too bad and a state retirement system that counts my military time for seniority, day 1 after I finish training I'll have 9.75 years seniority, pretty nice.

I have an 8 month probationary period, but apparently after I get done with that I have enough seniority points that I can apply to a Lieutenant position almost immediately. Skipping Sergeant entirely doesn't sound like a bad ladder :)

The dumb bitch actually presented her plagiarized assignment, and what's worse, she gave us several lines from some Obama speeches about needing to come together. There is no end to this idiot's idiocy.

Had my meeting with the professor about this issue with the expelled member of my group, and the dumbass girl couldn't bother to show up to the meeting. I presented my information, told the instructor and the department head, why I asked for the revisions and they both agreed that the revisions were necessary to get a passing grade on the paper. Following that I pointed out how she blatantly copy and pasted several websites without citation and pushed the ideas as her own work and the mood of the room immediately changed. I went on to further prove the situation by giving her the documentation that I built up and the department head stormed out of the room, it appears a formal reprimand of academic dishonesty is in it's early stages.

The issue of me being accused of racism has been refuted, and she has to deliver a public apology for that. On the case of Academic Dishonesty, another professor is being brought in for his allegations against the student, and if he goes through with it my English Professor told me that two instances of plagiarism constitutes a trend and said student will be dismissed from the University.

Kinda sucks for her, she's two quarters shy of graduation with her BS, but the way I see it; I know she's done this in the past, she's done it and jeopardized the grades of 5 people, what's to say she won't do it again, and how many times she's done it in the past. Karma is a bitch, and looks like it just came right around on her.

The instructor didn't show last night and after class I found an email that asked if I could make it just before 1pm today. With the bullshit she was pulling last night, harassing one of my other team members, oh I'm going to destroy this bitch.

Apparently I'm being called a racist for dumping this woman from our group and now the instructor is calling for me to explain myself, hooray. Of course the instructor has to do this because of the accusation, and well since I have all my ducks in a row I said "alright, I'll see you Monday." Which has the woman that is making the accusation worried, I've already received an apology from her via email, but the accusation was made in public so the damage is done and Karma is a fucking bitch.

I went through her paper with a fine tooth comb and found 15 points of outright plagiarism from her portion of our group paper. She also didn't cite correctly the single quote that she did use, she pulled a quote from a partial article from a .com site. The citation she used wouldn't have been so bad, but it was a partial article from a pay site and she used it to open her paper, and didn't follow through with it or anything of the sort. It's just a quote there to fill space. The dumb ass also gave me 17 pages of articles earlier in the project and just using a simple search prompt I found that she plagiarized at least 85% of her word count. God I love Ebscohost.

So I've highlighted all the plagiarized words from her research, printed out all my emails that I sent her (and the rest of the group because I never sent an email to her that I didn't address to everyone in the group, and the instructor), and printed out her section of the paper she turned in as her "final" draft. It also turns out that another member of my group is taking an ethics class and the member we kicked out is in the class as well, last week the instructor for her ethics class also called her out for outright plagiarism.

This is clearly not the first class or group she's done this to. What goes around, comes around and the way I see it, it's her turn. This paper is weighted 60% of our final grade and if let this go to pass it would've caused 5 people to fail the class. And the only counter-argument she can make is that I kicked her out because she's black, sorry, sweetheart, I kicked you out because you're a cheat and a horrible writer. The saddest part is that she's the one that pushed me into the leadership role in the first place.

What a dumb bitch. In my findings, 85% of her word count comes from copied and pasted source material that she claimed as her own work.

Who does it twice? Oh yeah, I sure as hell did, much better then end of the quarter homework!

I did, that's for damn sure and it was fan damn tastic!

You know, group projects are one thing. When you're in a management class and you're assigned to investigate a company that takes several people to do it right. But why on god's green earth do we need 5 people to write a 12 page APA style paper? And who fucking told one woman in my group that bullet points constitutes a final draft of a professional paper?

So, we have this "Big" (I am really loathe to call it a big assignment) end of the quarter assignment that took a few days to coordinate correctly and get things done, but of course there's always that one person that either doesn't get the point, or doesn't want to. The woman in question has been fighting my style since the group put me in charge and I shot down her idiotic ideas for the paper, but turning in a "final" copy of her part of the group paper with nothing but bullet points, who the fuck does that?

After three consecutive quarters of required writing classes, I hope this isn't the culmination of her skills. If it is, I hope she fails out the rest of the courses, if you can't learn how to communicate with other students by your junior year of college...then how the fuck should you be allowed to graduate?

So yeah, I have another week of work at my guard unit (that whole 2 weeks a year thing, though it's been reduced to 9 days) and I got a call from the corrections job I interviewed for, so I got that job, woot! Then I find out 30 minutes later that if one of the guys in my shop doesn't get his passport in the next 20 days I'll be headed to Afghanistan...joy.

Got my letter from the JAG officer to give to the student services people and my former stats instructor that penalized me for being called up for disaster relief by giving me a zero on 3 homework assignments and a midterm because I missed a week of school because of the call-up. Which is illegal, since there's no choice in the matter. So I have that ready to go.

Also got in my replacement iPod, so that came in right on time, nice to have portable music again at the least.

So, I'm hoping that this passport comes in because I really don't want to take 4 online classes at a minimum while over there, but to graduate on time I'll have to.

Rumors flew very rampantly, most expected (and were told) we'd be gone for a few days (3 at most) but I knew better than that, by Wednesday the governor told us we'd possibly be active for a month, but that wasn't the case either.

( Read below for the exploits of Task Force Gypsy )

It's been a pretty full week. I feel good, helped some people, and even was on CNN. Gave a few lectures to idiots that thought that bringing their charcoal grills inside their homes was a good idea. But, when it's negative 8 degrees Fahrenheit a lot of people are thinking more of warmth than they are of the dangers of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide. But just in case you're ever in that position, don't do it, because my lecture is pretty nasty. As a family was killed in Louisville during the storm due to the same mistake.

Well guys, after babysitting my entire family in my little ass apartment for a week because I drew the short straw by being the only person in my extended family with power, I just got a phone call an hour ago to find out my unit's been activated and I'm leaving to some part of the state to dig people out of snow or something.

Yay, guard. So I'm gonna be gone for a while.

"Dave" from Macroeconomics is at it again, now is insisting that paying 150 million taxpayers 1 million dollars will only cost 8 Billion dollars.

http://www.newsarama.com/film/010922-OscarNoms.html

Ledger lands a nomination, but the film and the director both get snubbed. Though hey at least Downey got a nomination for best supporting actor in Tropic Thunder...which I thought as a highly overrated movie, if not for Downey it would've been total garbage imo.

No mention of Iron Man, or Incredible Hulk anywhere near the Oscars. Not at all surprised though.

Why is it that people are so easily offended?

I know, I have an asshole streak when I really want to and I tend to speak my mind honestly and though there are times when I should really stop and step back before some poor sap jumps out of a window. Well, not that bad.

So same Econ class, different person this time. I had this response to the minimum wage question when I think it should be lowered, it's my opinion that's all it is, not like I've studied the situation or anything like that, and I called Minimum Wage Jobs the lazy way to make a living and this woman responds with "I'm deeply offended that you called me lazy!"

Lady, I didn't call you lazy, I don't even know you. I called the thought of using minimum wage to live comfortably and raise three kids lazy, can we please discern the two ideas please?

Then again the world still needs people to grasp for the bare minimums I guess...

Gah, people!