April 19th

Last night was one of those great nights where everything happens at once.

Shortly after we got on shift, the lieutenant had to go to SMU. Smu is the Special Management Unit, our psych unit. We had just got our orderlies out to clean their respective units, when she called me and said she needed some staff up in SMU to assist with an inmate that was out of control. They were going to need a team to place the inmate in a restraint chair. The restraint chair is a chair that is low to the ground and on wheels that has straps for the arms, legs and chest to restrain an inmate that may cause self harm. So two of our staff left the building in a hurry to go help. We had to lock our orderlies back up, since we were now working with only two floor staff in the building, not enough to respond if we were to have a problem.
The two staff that went out to help made it as far as the foot gate. Our unit is entirely fenced in within the institution. There is a gate that we go through that is right under one of the towers, and that tower has a switch to open the gate to let us in and out. So of course, the lock failed. The Lt. is freaking out wanting those staff in SMU NOW, and they are stuck behind the gate trying desperatley to get out. They are finally able to get the gate to release so they can get out, but the lock is still malfunctioning, so they start trying to get someone out to fix it.

Then about ten minutes after this mess, while still running with just two staff in the building, I get a call from our transport unit. They are on the way to our unit in about twenty minutes with six new inmates for us from an institution in eastern Oregon. Now we don't have enough staff to bring these guys in, we don't have a lieutenant that can authorize the gate to be lifted to bring them in, and the gate still isn't fixed even if we did. They ended up having to bring them in through the visiting area for our unit, and they had to help bring them in. They were ecstatic over this news, as they were already running late and several hours past what should have been the end of their shift already.

Well, eventually, we got our new admits in and settled, they got the guy in SMU in the chair and settled down and the gate got fixed. It was getting late at this point, so the orderlies didn't get out to finish cleaning so they did what inmates do best and bitched, whined and complained for a while, but things finally calmed down and the rest of the night went pretty smooth.

On a happier note, looks like the weather is going to be kind tonight so I can ride the bike to work. What a way to spoil a good ride, having to pull in to work at the end of it. Oh well, I gotta be there, might as well enjoy getting there.