Microtransactions and YOU

Hi there! Do you like games? A lot of us do! From Monopoly to Call of Duty, games have found their way into our brains and hearts for all of human history. It feels pretty good to be at such a time in history that my games can interact with me as much as I do with others who play. How it brings us all together.

  Games have evolved to an incredible degree, even timeless board games can be ported to electronic means. You can play in many ways: on your phone, computer or dedicated console and there are more people involved with the development and execution of games than ever and this leads to an interesting dillema. How do you recoup the costs to make a game and be able to convince a shareholder to sponsor you again? The answer used to be sheer volume of games sold.

  For now, let's focus on the electronic video games section of games we play and how great games become reality. A person or team has an idea for a game but no money to make it, so, they partner with a sponsor who will pay for them to make the game before it can be sold to recoup costs. The game is sold, the customer now has the game, the original person or team must come up with a completely new idea for there to be any more income. This is the way video games have worked for most of the time they've been a thing. 

  As games got more and more visually appealing with longer play times and hours worth of complicated coding, the need to simply make more money was real. The manpower needed to make a game at the top of its class was growing and with it the number of paychecks that needed to be filled. The gamers demanded more games and better games without stopping to consider that it might raise the standard price for a game. 

 Enter the downloadable content. For many gamers who had seen the fall of the Atari and the rise of the Sony Playstation it sounded a warning bell. A sense that something wasn't right. Games needed to stay under a certain price to be accessible to the widest range of players. This was a constant the industry couldn't get around and it was their biggest obstacle to overcoming the rising costs of development. Now, with downloadable content, a game could be released sooner and the team could have more time to refine work, a process that could take up to a year or more. Not only that, they could fill player's needs for more content from the same game and charge extra for it, a strategy netting them an additional source of income. A relatively complete game would be released, satisfying players for new releases and a few months later, a new part of the same game would come out that players could buy at a fraction of the price of a new game. Players who were strapped for cash may lean towards spending money for extended play of a favourite game in favor of spending full price for a new release.

  This was a win/win situation for everyone involved until foreseeable problems would inevitably arrive. Developers released more and more extra content and the new releases got shorter and shorter.  Some games got pay downloads that released on schedule with activities restricted behind paywalls. Players who had spent the full price for a title suddenly found themselves realising they'd now spent hundreds of dollars for very similar experiences over and over in downloads and missed out on trying something new.

  The era of downloadable content(DLC) had begun and was unstoppable. Players felt that they didn't want to miss out on extra content nor did they want to keep paying for the same content that many felt should have been included in the original release. Enough players kept the system supported and left others feeling as though they weren't considered. 

  The next phase of earning more revenue was born from DLC in the form of the microtransaction. Now, Microtransactions got their start exclusively in the mobile gaming market. Games that were free to download and had just enough content to get a player interested, would put nearly necessary content behind a paywall. A farm game might have a crop worth a lot of in-game money but it takes so much real time to grow it that it's not worth it and you end up just harvesting turnips over and over which, studies show, isn't fun. This same game would put in a speed booster to make the crop viable to make in-game money but a player would have to spend their real life money to get it. 

  Microtransactions worked very well in the mobile market because mobile games were never meant to compete with console and PC games. They were supposed to be games you played for a few minutes while you were bored or waiting. They were completely separate and weren't even developed by major companies like Activision or Square-Enix.  Then, they did notice.

 

 With the popularity of smartphones increasing, the market of mobile gamers grew larger and larger and so did the amount of people with disposable income. Microtransactions became synonymous with purchasing a game in many small parts and the only way to make a whole product. People would download what was a glorified trial masquerading as a complete game and then be forced to purchase all the parts they actually wanted separately.  Now, a "free" game cost nearly 15-20 dollars when a player wasn't expecting to spend any money. The purchases were made intentionally small so it wouldn't be so bad, a dollar here, two dollars there.

 Big games finally noticed. They started making mobile add-ons for games that were supposed to compliment the main game or make playing it easier. A good example is Grand Theft Auto V and it's mobile extention, iFruit. A player didn't necessarily have to play the mobile compliment but it made it possible to train an in-game pet to make finding items easier. It was free to download but came with cosmetic upgrades for the pet at the tune of real cash money. This was different than mobile games because premium console and PC titles already skirt the limit of what money a gamer or their parents will pay. 

 Microtransactions work in large titles by unlocking. This means the content is already in the game but unable to be used before meeting certain requirements.  This is not a new concept for most players. Older players will regale us with stories of having to play a game a certain way before gaining access to this content. Today, that same system is not put behind a play wall but a pay wall. Where you once unlocked a character or outfit by playing the game, now, you simply put in a credit card number and you can have all the new bandannas you can stomach. 

 At first, the paid content was purely cosmetic and didn't have much influence on playability. Sure, you could buy a new shirt but it wouldn't make you jump higher. Gamers quickly realized they were paying for worthless items and they were skeptical of the market. Companies responded. Items began having an impact in other ways. Purchased items would be used to gain in game advantages. A game which require you to grind for a certain currency could be circumvented by purchasing the extra items and then selling them for that currency and some games just offered packs of currency at an exchange rate. Players who had the extra money could make themselves tougher faster and had advantages over players who didn't have disposable income. The battle was split down two sides with players with money who didn't have an issue with the system on one side and gamers who could only afford a few titles a year on the other.

 Which leads to the real problem with microtransactions. Who needs a war between gamers in the real world when we have hundreds of thousands of pretend worlds to fight each other in? Developers need to be paid. Sponsors need to have the reassurance that developers will make a game people want to play. I get that. The higher the cost of making the titles, the higher the starting costs. A better situation was when players could look at how much they would have to work in-game for an item and weigh the pay costs against that time to make a decision. More and more, lately, the time needed to work for a cosmetic upgrade is so large that players get disheartened. 35 weeks of estimated play time for flaming wolf armor? It was too much! 

  The only way to tell companies that we don't want Microtransactions is to demand complete transparency in the industry about where that money goes. There are enough people buying extra content that the practice will never truly go away. We gamers have the power to infiuence how the money is used. If Destiny charges $5 dollars for a little dance I'd like to know where that money is going. I want to receive an email an hour after making a purchase that says "Thank you for supporting Destiny! $5 has been added to funds necessary for development of new texture shading with our 15-person team!"

 We could also vote with our wallets and just not purchase but miss out on anything more than a bare-bones experience. The point is, is that Microtransactions worked so well that we will never be rid of them, a few people making purchases of hundreds of dollars makes up for a lot of players who can't spend the extra dollar and once a source of income has been identified, it's truly idiotic to give it up. 

 So the next time you're playing Candy Crush and you see a boost for .99¢, think about where all that money is going and how is it truly helping you? In this age of instant gratification, we might need to step back and remind ourselves that games are supposed to be fun,  engaging and help pass the time. When you have to put in more hours at work to play your game at home on your own time, it defeats all of those good things. 

 Consider this, as we come to a close, that if you work a job that pays $10 an hour and microtransactions cost you $20 a month, then, you are working two hours every month to pay for it. That's comparable to paying a monthly bill such as water or trash pickup.  When a company reports record high earnings in a quarter then sticks flashy gun skins in your face for a dollar, you have to ask yourself: What good is my money really doing?

Existentialism

If you're anything like me, your world is your world. Indeed, if you want to get down to brass tacks and talk about the human condition, how we view ourselves is WAY more important than you'd think. 

            What I think I look like

         What I actually look like 

  We get so caught up in what others would think or how our family would react that we forget the truly most important person to us: ourselves.  

 A lot of people spend their lives living to make other people's lives easier: we may never complain in front of a friend because we know of a hardship they've gone through, we may not tell our parents what's really going on in our lives and possibly the worst of all, we may lie to a doctor because we are afraid of judgement. (Of course I quit all the salt, doc!)

 Humans are a fucking weird species. We've dumped most of our biologic instincts at the back door and ushered along something called a social contract. The Social Contract (SC) is best explained as the animal behavior that we willingly give up in exchange for social behavior we may not be inclined to, to ensure the best survival of the species as a whole.

  A good example of this is getting married. 

Most other animals don't mate for life and the ones that do just find the first mate they can and stick with them. There are animals like geese that pair-bond so tightly that even if one dies, the other one never mates again. Humans are not generally like this. We date before finding a mate (again, not counting cultures that do arranged marriages) and may not stay with the same mate for life, as evidenced by the amount of single parents and divorcees. We don't even pick our mates by the strength of their genes, we pick someone we like! No animals do this. We say to each other "I like you the best and I won't have sex with anyone else." because sex is our strongest instinct and we've fucked it ALL up with making it a taboo part and yet the defining factor in romantic relationships.

 This is one of the ways we ignore our own biology in favor of what we think the Social Contract demands. We do what looks good from the outside, not what is good for our insides. Mom says to marry a good-looking rich man so you do and you are miserable because you'd be happier with a slightly ugly guy or maybe even another woman.  You may not even realise that you've "settled" for what your mom wanted, not what you wanted and you might not even know what you want because you've been told something else your whole life! That's the really creepy part. How much of you is you and how much is learned? Okay, back up, gettin a little off topic, lets move on... 

  When all the lights have gone out for the day and you're laying there in bed perhaps with your significant other, who are you really there with? You. At that moment is when it's the clearest that you might not know what you want out of life because you've listened to other people who were important to you.  Then you go to sleep and forget all about your deep thoughts and you wake up in the morning just barely able to remember the dream you had about eating cereal on the handlebars of Jeff Goldblum's bicycle while he pedaled through a purple field, much less the epiphany you had. It's rough! 

                   I swear this was a middle school ten seconds ago.

  We get so sidetracked, go to college, get married, have kids and all of that, that we forget to find out what makes us happy. There's so much distraction and advertising is really the worst. I despise advertising in it's current form because all advertising does is show us what we want, not what we need out of the product. Lightbulb commercials show big, happy, clean families living in perfect houses in general situations unlike you'll ever really need a lightbulb in.  You hardly ever need the batteries for a flashlight when the kids are camping in the backyard, you need it when someone uses a hair dryer and trips the circuit breaker and the whole back half of the house goes dark! We don't need makeup to highlight our already perfect faces, we need that shit to cover up that we're actually a 35ft long creature from the Paleozoic era asking for tree fiddy!

  It's like, thanks to what's good for the entire species, we lose our individuality. I don't mean everyone's a snowflake or any of that weird bullshit, I mean that we don't get to choose a life for ourselves. 

 We need education, however, we don't educate children how to think for themselves, it's usually memory and a set of generally useful subjects that's good at being good and awful at encouraging what will develop a kids natural abilities. Every Child Must Learn X Subject. Not every child is going to excel at these subjects for any number of reasons but on the other side, are the kids who are innately talented for certain areas. But we sandwich them in to every class making sure they spend just as much time in hated science as they do in loved English. We do it for the good of the group. We have to. We haven't come up with a widely accepted way for this to change. 

  All the while we're in school the goal is to go to college for something you might not even like in favor of how much money you can make and then you're supposed to settle down with a spouse. Every single person gets told this, at least in America. This is the Tradition and The Way We Do Things. Sure, there are some exceptions but people actually stress out about doing these things because other people told them to! I've met a lot of people who put themselves through heartache and years of hating their lives, just because it made their parents happy.

  Lolwhut? Okay, I'm going to lose a lot of you here and that's okay, maybe I'm not good at explaining things. There's a LOT of good advice from parents. They had an entire life before you and there are things you can learn from that but their situation and yours are very different. What exactly worked for them may not work for you and some of us haven't got the heart to say you appreciate what they have to say but must respectfully decline.  

  Maybe you want to be a long-haul driver for a few years to get a feel for the whole country before you decide on what city to live in or what higher education to pursue. There's a certain stigma to truck drivers and you may have pressure to go to a good college and have a nice, safe office job. You might find during your journey that you prefer horticulture or rescuing and fostering animals. Something you may not even need to go to college for. 

Someone gets paid the big bucks to do this.

 I think we all have to take a step back and ask ourselves "what do I want," without feeling selfish. We're taught that to think of ourselves is the worst injustice you can do, especially when it affects someone else. That's why so many people stay married "for the kids" and stay in a miserable job because it makes their parents proud or is good for the country.

 We did this to ourselves and now we're sad sacks most of the time who can't even figure out if we love watching the colors of a sunset or just that we have a few moments to watch it. I said earlier we fucked sex ALL up. Humans are socially monogamous. We can choose a mate for life or we can dump that mate and choose another. People break up and divorce all the time and we look down on those people because we think it isn't fair to us, who are still with our significant other and upholding the promises we made to the other person. We think people who chose to never have children are weird because no one presented us with the option that we didn't have to have them. Girls like pink, boys like blue. 

Janice keeps telling me I need to do yoga, well, fuck you Janice, I like Rugby!

Generalities are GREAT for the species as it helps fill roles that need to be filled, gender nonwithstanding. It's TERRIBLE for individuals because we often feel being ourselves will not benefit anyone else. This is pretty awful because with as much emphasis as we put on equality for all humans regardless of sex, race or capabilities, it doesn't promote individual equality. Our current social contact was accepted a long time ago when we didn't have scientific explanations for why things happened or why boys are good at some things and girls are good at another and that's okay.

 I'm rambling like hell now and I'm not even sure where I wanted to go with this, maybe that we look at the whole species and don't think about what would make us happy because we're too busy thinking about the whole species, which doesn't do us as an individual any good. To make the whole species better and happier we have to work on the smallest parts of it, ourselves. 

 Maybe quit listening to what makes other people happy when they see you and concentrate more on making yourself happy when you look in the mirror. If you want curls, do it and fuck what your peers think.

 Or dress up like R-2D-2, whatever works

Cheese Curds

           I fucking love cheese curds. 

 Some of you are genuinely confused. I know I was when I first moved here and heard about them for the first time.  They are not, in fact, sopping bags of cottage cheese. This was my first thought when I first heard the term because the only cheese where I come from is kraft and velveeta. Not saying these don't have their applications but that's not cheese. When I first moved here, I actually went into overload because I had never seen so much cheese everywhere before. You can't go anywhere in Wisconsin without bumping into some kind of cheese. 

Everything you need to survive is on this shelf in a gas station: curds, cheese sticks and sausage. This same shelf is in EVERY gas station. Even the applesauce but I love it and cheese is awesome.

  Cheese curds are actually brand new cheddar cheese. Cheddar cheese doesn't form in a block or wheel, there's a whole process and it's much shorter and less climactic than you'd think.

  They take the raw milk and pasteurize it then boil it and add some enzymes to separate the curd, which will become the cheese, from the whey, which will become nutrition shakes and ricotta cheese. That's where you get "whey protein", it's the dried, leftover liquid from cheese making. I mix this into my milk and cereal in the morning to help me maintain weight. If you were to cook this liquid whey, you'd get ricotta cheese which actually means "twice cooked". 

Here, the separation has already happened and this worker is cutting up the curd while stirring it. This makes that shit easier to drain and once you separate the curd, it's edible from this moment on. See that pitchfork stick the worker has? The size of the partitions determines the size of the curd. They might even get down to using tiny squares if the curd is simply going to make block cheese.

          Hehehe, cheese packer...

 This is how you get blocked or wheeled cheddar. They put all of the drained loose curd into a mold and then stack big ass weights on top to get it to stick together. That's why, when you break a block of cheddar, it crumbles and doesn't break cleanly and you're left with an uneven block of fucking cheese that won't fit on the sandwich so you just decide to eat it like a caveman with your hands. 

 

                This shit right here

 These are bigger curds that will be sold as snack food. They're all dry and wiggly like a thousand peices of jello!! Seeing a big barrel of curds never fails to make me giggle because they're so jiggly and dumb, they need googly-eyes. These curds get bagged up as soon as they're done draining, a fresh curd is a happy curd! 

 Remember how I said they were jiggly? That's because they're kinda rubbery and when you bite into a really fresh one, they squeak! They're little teeny squeaks like tiny shoes playing a basketball game on a floor that's just been waxed in your mouth. That makes me happy. It's happy food.  

  They come in a variety of flavors, colors

 and you can eat them refrigerated or warm, depending on the age. It IS just cheese, which in theory would just age and the flavor would deepen but curds in bags like the one above are moist and are exposed to air, unlike the curds that are stored to make formed cheese and those conditions make mold. Moldy cheese is bleu cheese and not yummy curds so just refrigerate them after you buy them.

    If you touch my curds, I will bite you.

If you want to ramp it up into heart attack proportions, look no further than fried curds. These delicious nuggets have been rolled in a wet batter and briefly dipped in hot oil long enough to brown the outside. You know how there's stuffed-crust pizza and when you got it you just ate the crust? That was just me? Oh, okay. Well, that's what fried curds are like, all gooey, stringy, melty cheese on the inside.

  I had trouble imagining this when I moved here and kept getting grossed out by visions of trying to fry a spoonful of the same cottage cheese (which are curds just even earlier than the solid curds) my grandma ate peaches with. I never really liked cottage cheese before but when you have some that's made by a bunch of different tiny independent farms, you can at least respect all the different nuances. 

 I love having access to really good cheese like Muenster and Havarti as well as mild Cheddars and Gruyere. I find myself wishing it were cheaper to mail the shit across the country or a lot of people from home wouldn't have trouble finding good cheese either. I participated in an international snack food-themed anonymous gift exchange and sent cheese. The cheese curds themselves weren't expensive, even a specialty store will sell them for 5-7 dollars a bag and they usually come in pound and half pound divisions. Try eating a pound of cheese. It's great for snacking but you'll hurt your poor toilet. Please, think of your toilet when bingeing on cheese curds. Anyway, cheese is fat and fat is heavy so that crap cost me $14 to mail cross country and I didn't even get a bag of Doritos in return. Talk about disappointment. At that moment I would have been happy to even have gotten tamarind candy, which if you haven't grown up on curry powder, is NOT CANDY. That's how sad I was because it was a huge deal for me, as a lazy procrastinator, for me to take the extra 5 minutes out of my day and click to www.simonscheese.com and order the curds and select to have them shipped to my receiver's address. I even had to bend over to grab my purse and get my debit card! Tsk, some people just don't appreciate hard work, I tell ya.

Jail Tales: My Life As A Pod Worker

 I wanted to get more in-depth about some of my experiences while I was in jail and the first one is being an inmate worker. An inmate worker or pod worker is when a jailed person does manual labor for the jail in exchange for time off the total sentence. It's a very sought after position because it not only gets you home quicker but doing work is the best way to pass the time and make it seem shorter. 

  The way the jail I was in worked is that the jail holds a fuckton of male inmates compared to females and so there needs to be a chance for more of them to work off their time. This jail had a laundry and bakery for the meals and inmate clothing and there are a number of janitorial positions available for men. This was not a luxury the females had. Since there were only beds for 45 women, there's only one worker. Where men get to spread the load out among many, there is a lone woman who takes care of everything in the one female section.  Where there will be two or three different workers who work two shifts on the men's side, there is one woman for both shifts on the women's side. I don't mean to make this sound like it's a hell hole and it's so hard because it isn't. It's actually better in the long run because I don't have to share the hours with anyone and I had my own private cell where I got to have a few more liberties. 

  I applied to be the pod worker the very first day. The girl on the job when I came in still had 24 days to go before she was released based on her hours worked and projected to work so I knew I just had to sit back and wait till it got closer to her release date.  Once her time was up I knew that my request had been sitting there long before anyone else's and I didn't cause trouble nor did I get very involved with dayroom drama. I had a very good chance.

  I don't remember all the names of the guards and I don't think I could tell you their names anyway but this particular guard was a well groomed man who shaved every day and all the girls loved him. I'll call him Officer Cutie Pie.

  Well, Officer Cutie Pie comes in one day while I'm working through Stephen King's The Drawing of The Three for the 3rd time because it's the only decent book out of all the bibles and romance novels and he calls out my name. He asks if I still want to be a worker and I answer in the affirmative. I'm told to pack up my stuff and meet him out in the corridor. 

  This section of the jail was set up like a nav station in a military movie. The officer sits in a large room with all the dayrooms like the points on the statue of liberty's crown in front and on the sides of them. There's one door that goes into the dayrooms from the desk side and one going out into the maintence halls. I never got to go out there.  Behind the desk there's the supply closet and the "gym" which is just a big room you're allowed to walk and run in. Beside the gym is another supply closet and the double locked vestibule that leads to the rest if the jail. The only time I ever went out here is when I sat the trash out at night, going to court and of course booking and release.  The whole desk area was rather dark and  with the old microphone intercom it reminded me of an old war room or a mad scientist keeping subjects in an experiment. It didn't help that there were giant one-way mirrors everywhere. I could see them but they couldn't see me. So if I did a good job, you can imagine the area and the quiet, secretive atmosphere from being shut off from the inmates but still able to see them from all angles. 

 I got moved from the 20 cell room to one of the 9 cell rooms because the handicap single bed cell was there. This meant I would likely not have another cellmate as long as I was working, which was fine with me but I'd also have to give it up in case an inmate came in who needed it, which I was more than fine with. This didn't happen. The rules got to be a little different. There were certain hours I had to work and ones I didn't. I could choose to do more work but during those "off" hours I could come and go from my dayroom to the officer's station whenever I wanted to, never had to use the intercom and didn't have to participate in most of the headcounts or lockdowns. I had to be in my cell during the night and right after lunch but other than that, as long as I was busy doing something, I had free reign of the whole pod. You bet your ass I didn't stay in my cell for a moment more than I had to. 

  The job also came with several unwritten and written perks. I didn't really have the choice the not clean a mess but I was rewarded pretty nicely for having to do so. I'll expound in a minute. I got to keep anything anyone left behind when they transferred and if someone refused a meal, well that meant I got that meal too. To be real, that's the whole reason why I really wanted to be a worker was the extra food. I was so hungry all the time. It never ended. I ate a lot of double breakfasts and some double lunches but everyone ate dinner so I did the most horrible thing ever, I just sneaked untouched desserts when I was taking back the trays and supposedly looking for missing spoons. The officers never said a word as long as the job got done. This was also how I finally got real shampoo and toothpaste. A girl left them behind when she got shipped off to prison. I never said I was proud of any of this it just proves that it's not a nice place to be even if you do the best you can.

 I said I didn't have the choice to not clean a mess. That means every time someone left I had to clean their cell and they always left them in the same shape that public bathrooms in apocalypse movies are in, graffiti with pencil (harder to remove than you think), toilet paper mâché stuck on everything, shit in the toilet along with several rolls of paper, piss puddles on the mattresses and one delightful girl left me with a scrawl written in her very own menses. That one was REALLY fun. The joke was on them for the toilet because those fuckers would eat a horse. I would just flush it, paper and all, and down it would go and be the easiest part of my job, HA! Suckers.

  I also had to get up sometimes in the middle of the night (midnight literally) and go down to the temporary pod and clean out the drunk tank. Fuck that shit. There was always shit everywhere. I never saw any throw up thank god but there was ALWAYS shit. Like a person had no right to project their excrement in such interesting arcs but somehow I routinely hosed crap off the ceilings, frosted windows, light fixtures and walls. 

  Once, someone pulled one of the sprinkler heads off the wall and it set it off in that cell drenching the inmate and the entire cell from stem to stern with putrid, rotten, black nasty water that had been sitting in the pipe for ages. Whose job was it to clean that up? Mine. Lol. 

  I AM NOT COMPLAINING. For real, I am grateful for every mess I cleaned and every gross thing I did or saw because it did make the time go a hell of a lot faster and I have you to tell it to! I got a giant squeegee for that and a big hose and the entire orange cleaner budget to work with and from what it looked like before I started and what I left it looking like, I'm fucking proud of how I did. 

  There were rewards for doing all these dirty jobs and it was usually food. For the really bad ones I even got a respirator and a hazmatesque suit and double time worked so it was relatively fair. The food was always something I wasn't supposed to have. They once let me have an entire good meal and eat it in my cell because it was after midnight. (It was always after fucking midnight!) I got an orange, a peanut butter sandwich, a styrofoam cup with real orange Gatorade  and a bag of Cheetos. It was the best! Again, even with the sometimes extra meals I was constantly motivated by the thought of more food. 

  During the breakfast and lunch service there were official happenings like guard changes and their lunch breaks and because of this, the timing would be very strict. I had only as much time as everyone else to eat but three times the things to do so I actually only had about 7 minutes to eat either breakfast or lunch.  Here, I'll explain the run down of my typical day so you can get the feel for it. I'll try to be brief so if you have questions, please leave them in the comments and I'll try to explain. 

 At 4:15 am the intercom buzzes and I get my wake up call. I go out and get some hot water to make coffee and get dressed in my khaki jumpsuit. (Everyone else wears orange) I do it quickly because I want to wake up before the food cart comes in. I rush to get the cleaning buckets together for the dayrooms. Inmates need a toilet brush, glass cleaner, mops and brooms to clean their own cells with so I have to put those in there. I collect them again after breakfast.

 The food carts are delivered by dudes from the kitchen and are massive. They come in at 4:45 and me and the other workers aren't even really allowed to make eye contact. No one is hot though so it doesn't matter. The carts are partially prepared. All the food is on it, I just have to make sure all the trays have spoons and to pour the cups of drank. It's not even real Koolade, it's just powder drink mix that is so tart it's nasty. It's drank, I don't care what the spellers say. There's a couple of 80's style jugs that the drank is poured from and that motherfucker spills a little every goddamned time. Fuck those jugs. 

  After I've poured the drank and made sure every tray has a spoon, I gotta put these trays through a slot while people on the other side take them. Everyone lines up in the day room and eats out there. That's the easy part. Did I say that before? That the only utensil you will ever eat with in jail is a spoon? Because it is.

  There are usually one or two people who don't want to eat and so I'd get their eggs, oatmeal and blueberry cake. Then, I'd go back out and collect the trays and count the spoons to make sure someone didn't throw one away or shove it up their ass or whatever and once the spoons were confirmed I pushed the carts out and started on morning mopping. 

  I had to mop the outer desk area, the gym, and the two 3 cell rooms. I could drag this task out very nicely and I included windexing the glass and wiping the countertops to make it longer. I also cleaned the guard's private bathroom and I could usually drag that out for about 15 minutes by humming whole songs. I usually spent the whole morning until lunch just lazily mopping and legit cleaning everything that could be touched. 

  At lunch, the carts came back and the whole process was repeated like breakfast with one exception: if the woman guard was working, I got to take extra food in my cell to eat after she went on her lunch. If the male officer was working (mostly he was, argh) then I had even less time to eat than breakfast. I would be shoving unwanted food in my mouth as I was taking trays back and trying to gulp down a few more bites as I counted spoons. Tuesday or Thursday was hot dog day and always there were 4 or 5 hot dogs that didn't get eaten. There were no buns just a slice of white bread and a dollop of mustard. I fucking LOVE hot dogs so I tried, every single week, to eat all of those spare dogs. By the time I was released it wasn't difficult.

 So now the cart is back in the vestibule and I'm in my cell because the guard is on lunch. I write the first half of a letter to my husband and then I nap for a while. 

  I wake back up after lockdown and go back out to do some rearranging. The laundry room gets whites delivered almost daily. Whites are all the other clothes you wear under your jumpsuit, socks, undies and shirts. The reason they're called whites is that everything is white. There can be no color on any of it, not even a gray band or heel square. You either have someone bring you fresh ones that fit from outside or you have to use the ones the jail gives you. If they don't fit, you can keep requesting the size you need until you get it or you get out. It was my job to try to keep the stacks of laundry sorted so I could easily fill requests. I wasted three days breaking down the piles and organizing them by size and type so yay. I did this after lunch and continued to pretend to refine it daily until my release.

  After I've gone full reverse tornado on the whites, I grab my custodial cart and start going from dayroom to dayroom scrubbing the windows, public sink, showers, toilets and any concrete walkways. This does take a while because I pay attention and really do care about how clean I get this stuff. These are people no matter what and no one deserves to get sick because I want to go home early and am a lazy shit. I used very strong solution and cleaned all the surfaces with different scrubbers and cleaned the scrubbers after. I removed the hair and the shampoo residue and tried to get the scum off the floor so people wouldn't slip. I used paper towels to clean touched surfaces and did that several times a day. I even put in a request for a new mop and was granted it for the sake of not using the same mop to do both bathrooms and outside areas. 

  By the time I'm done with all this it's dinner time and this is the only time I don't have a limit on meal time but everyone always eats their dinner so what's the gain?

  After dinner, I go around and collect the trash and restock the toilet paper. I collect any games and books that are not being used in the dayrooms. I collect the little request slips and give them to the guard. Then I grab my mop bucket and start removing the scuffs from the gaurd's area floor. No, not kidding. I need to be doing something and removing scuffs takes a little over two minutes and there are a ton of scuffs. 

  The scuffs are done and I'm beat. It's a little after 7pm and I need a break. As a worker, I can have the water in the public shower turned on so I can clean up after I've done my nightly work. It's really kind of nice because I know it's clean when I go in there and I always clean it again when I'm done so others can enjoy a clean shower too. I go into my cell, write the rest of my letter, eat a lemon candy or a jolly rancher (still can't eat those today) and go to sleep for a bit. I wake up right about 9:15 and go back out to do the nightly cleaning. It's just a quick go-around to sanitize the doorknobs and surfaces like telephone and countertops. I vacuum the carpet in the dayrooms and then go back to my cell and go back to sleep. I never know when they will call me down to clean the temporary pod so I tried to make sure I got all the sleep I could. Even if I had to clean that night I still had to get up and do breakfast service at 4:45 so I'd still need to be up at 4:30 just to be awake for that. Sometimes the messes took a few hours to clean and those were rough days but for the most part I got along.

 Thus ends one day and begins another. Clean, scrub, collect and fill requests, serve food. That was my whole day for the next month and a half. I never got a change in schedule except to go to court and I never got a day off. It was a gruelling existence but it gave me something to do every day and things stayed clean and no one got sick so I wonder sometimes if I could use it as a job reference... Nah. 

 One last thing before I go, I was a fly on the wall for the first time in my life. I got to hear a lot of things and I was supposed to tell the guards anything I heard. I didn't unless people were planning to do really stupid shit like try to keep mess for later or trade. When people kept food in their cell without keeping it sealed, I tattled. We got ants frequently from improperly stored cakes and sweets from meals and I hated trying to get rid of them. I'd spray the persistent fuckers with an orange cleaner and try to sweep up the bodies but they always just mushed everywhere and I cleaned them up with paper towels. 

 If people got annoyed with each other and were talking shit quietly across the dayroom I told the guard because I fucking hate fighting. Other than that, I could give a fuck that you took an extra book or gave so and so some candy in exchange for some real soap. That shit doesn't need to be punished, we were just trying to make it a little better. 

  Some people had put in a request to work and didn't like me because they wanted the position. These were the ones who combined toilet paper, toothpaste and water to make mâché and put it all over the cells when they left. It's a little bit like concrete and when I chipped at it and finally broke it, there was usually a gift inside like more toothpaste, a bit of rotted food or in one case, human shit. Most of the time, people were decent to me because I listened to their requests and actually cleaned instead of acting like I was cleaning. 

  I may have missed a few things and over explained a few more but this was my experience as the sole inmate worker for the female section of a county jail. If you have questions, please leave them below and it should go without saying: stay out of trouble!

The Time I Went To Jail.

     So a few years back, some bad things happened and I went to jail. It was just county jail, not prison, which is arguably better depending on the circumstances. 

 What's getting arrested and booked like? You've been cuffed and put in the back of a cop car, it's hard plastic back there and you're pretty much sitting on your cuffed wrists or hands. It's super fucking uncomfortable. Every bump in the loose-ass shocks on that old cruiser will send you pitching around the back of the car struggling to keep up straight. You don't have your hands in front so this is a harder task than one would think. The cops don't drive nicely. They will take  some hard turns and go a little slower over potholes. This will hurt. Do some sit ups every day just in case so you can keep yourself upright. 

  Now, once you get to jail you go to a room with a cop who asks you to put everything that's in your pockets and purse on the table and take out all your jewelry. This officer has gloves and a mask on because you are a dirty, dirty human and I guess they get gloves but we don't? I don't know. Anyway, when the officer says "all your jewelry" they mean all of it. Tongue studs, eyebrow rings, wedding ring, belly rings and all the really fun ones down below that. Ears gotta be clean too. It all goes in a bag. When you get out you get it back, or you can release it to a family member but why would you do this and lose your street clothes? It's a mystery. 

  Okay, now you're stripped off all your dangles and deelibobs and sat out in a waiting room. They take your shoes and give you sandals. You'll be wearing these for a bit so be nice to them. You could be in the waiting room for five minutes or five hours, you just sit in the bad plastic chairs that are literally designed to not be comfortable.  The tv is on but you can't hear it either because the mute is on or there's three people trying to make phone calls on the payphones in this room. You pretty much have access to a phone from the get-go, at least from 9am to 9pm.  

  You wait till the next officer calls you up and takes all your info and makes you use the phone at the desk to call into the system so you can even use the phone because it's all voice recognition. (It's REALLY bad though!) Then, you sit some more until another officer shows up to take you to the locker room for your mugshot, (That's mine up there, btw) and finger-printing.

  They give you a ill-fitting uniform that they eyeballed your size on and then they stand there and watch you undress and redress. Yes folks that's right, you've got one or two cops in full dress wearing pistols and you're naked and vulnerable in front of them and you can't cover yourself or they'll think you're hiding something. Dear dog just hope you never  have to hear "squat and cough" because it's just as demeaning as it sounds.  I've never felt like the lowest scum on earth and never more inhuman than being forced to undress for them and them wearing guns and pants.  

  Moving on, after you're dressed and they put your clothes with your other stuff, they relocate you down the hallway to a holding pod. It's just a big room with some cells in it, it's probably got one big public shower at one end and the exit and phone at the other. Your county's jail might be very different, I'm just relating what ours is like because I've been there. 

  You get a cell, it might be just you, it might have another person in it, you never know. If there's another person, even if you end up hating them, you have to establish certain things like dressing and what to do if it's after hours and you have to poop. This is real, people!  

  They'll keep you in this temporary pod until they've figured out if they need to cut you loose on bond or put you in a permanent bed and this could take anywhere from 1-3 days. If you are figured to be spending more than 5 days in jail, you'll go to general population. You want this. Other classifications are maximum security and are less fun than a  tow trucker driver using his truck to pull a tooth. The people in there, are fucking crazy.

  You get shuffled again, you get a itchy as fuck wool blanket and toiletries like Donkey-Ass Tastin' Toothpaste and Straight Up Lye Soap. You also get this whack-ass toothbrush that the bristles fall out of like, right-thefuck-away. The soap is also the size of a biker's pinky so don't expect to be washing your hands for very long. If you're poor and got no one to put money in your inmate account, just get used to being a dirty, sweaty, halitosis having human.  No shampoo, no conditioner, no deoderant, nothing! I was very surprised to see that deoderant was not something they supplied. 

  You're in Gen Pop now in one of the bigger pods. I'm a girl and the facility I was in only has beds for 42 females so I just went there. There was one big room where there were 20 cells then two on the sides which had 9 cells and then another two rooms with 3 cells each. I went to the big 20 at first. My first day was filled with going to different rooms and doctors. They checked me for Tuberculosis and poxes of all kinds as well as MRSA and anythjng contagious. During my psych exam they determined I was bi-polar and put me on Lithium and gave me some BAD AS FUCK antibiotics for an infected tooth I had had before I came in. This was weird to me, to be put back on Lithium after nearly 15 years but I was curious to see if it had an effect. Not that I noticed. Then after that it was the same thing, day in, day out.

  I had a pretty cool cell mate (celly) and we had a good system going for nighttime sleeping, morning cleaning and poopin signs. It's all relative, we weren't friends just did what we said we'd do.  

  The worst part about it now is the lockdowns and headcounts. Not every place is this strict but we followed a very set schedule. 

  The lights would get brighter at 5am and the cells would unlock. There's a headcount where everyone lines up and gets (gasp!) counted. The cleaning supplies would get put out and we had to clean our own cells including mopping, glass, sink and toilet scrubbing too. We did this gladly because the least you can do in this place is clean. Breakfast is served at 5:30. Sometimes it's hot, sometimes it's eggs and toast. Cold. The trick to making jail food edible is to mix a bunch of it together.  If you got a blueberry cake with breakfast and some nasty tasteless oatmeal, you put those two together and now you have blueberry oatmeal. After breakfast the nurses come around and people who have to take daily medication (I took lithium and antibiotics for a tooth infection) have to line up and take it through the food slot. 

  Then it's usually back to sleep for most people. The best time to write a letter or do anything that you can for yourself is from 6am until 9am. No one is doing shit during those hours. 

  At 9 there's a lockdown and another headcount and you have to stay in cells until 11am, when lunch is served. You come out, eat, then go back in for another half hour, so the next time you can come out is noon.  This is when people come out and socialize and ask to go to the gym.  (We write out requests on peices of paper and the inmate worker takes them to the co all day) People play cards and chat out in the day room or chill in their cells with the door open.  Every other day we can take a shower. We can ask for a razor but they don't work and you don't get shave lotion or anything so everyone gets kind of hairy. Also every other day you have to put your laundry in a bag and it dissapears for 24 hours then you get it back clean and hot-smelling and repeat. I wouldn't be surprised if that laundry got as hot in the dryer near the point of combustion. Ruined the elastic on all of the pants. All of them. 

  At 5pm they serve dinner then if people are on prescribed medication they'll put it through the slot after dinner. There have been some stupid fucks who think it's cute to put the meds in their cheek and not swallow them to trade for stuff or just get high whenever. If the nurse even suspects that this has happened (they watch you take it) the whole place goes berserk, nuclear lockdown complete with headcounts, searches, water getting shut off so stuff can't be flushed down toilets and everyone getting herded to the gym for personal and cavity searches. 

  So if you go to jail and risk all of us getting cavity searched because you can't wait to get high? Fuck you. 

  After night meds, your options are to watch group tv, read alone in your cell, socialize or ask to go to gym again until 9pm. (I keep saying gym, there was no equipment just a gym floor you could walk or run on) 

At 9, there's a lockdown and at 9:30 there's the final headcount and lockdown and the lights dim at 10pm.  

 That's a typical day. Nothing ever changes, it's like a bad painting of life, a large representation of the word stasis.

  I got lucky and wrote a request to become the female inmate worker and after 30 days I got it. The changes? Fucking night and day. 

 I got my own cell with a single bed, for starters. This was the turning point of tolerable, no celly to bother me! I scrubbed a lot of nasty shit but that's a story for another post. 

  After the initial shock wears off, you kind of get used to the strict routine. It's the same tv shows, the same people, the same mealtimes, the same card game, walk in the same circle in gym and so on and so on for however long you're there for. 

  Waiting for sentencing is the pits. You don't get to just talk to your lawyer whenever you want, it pretty much has to be during business hours and since calling from jail is a collect call you can't leave a message. You can write a letter but that takes time too. Just waiting those days can make them stretch into what feels like weeks.  The people who come to see you, you have to know their names, addresses and birthdates and the list takes time to approve. You may have come in on a weekend and you can't order anything from the canteen that week so you use the Donkey Ass Tastin Toothpaste until you can get some

Mother fuckin Colgate. 

  After everything settles down and your court dates start coming through, you still don't know how long you'll be in, just that I took a plea deal and still spent 89 days in jail and didn't know when I was getting out until the day I was released. That was the most fucked up feeling because I was in complete frozen mode where nothing really mattered, I couldn't change the course of fate so I just went with it until I was shoved back out on the street. 

 That's the last part of this whole thing, the release. I did not play to the co's but I didn't make trouble for them either, I just tried to be and do my job. They were professionally polite to me, as in, did not ticket me for eating an extra tray that another inmate didn't want or include my cell in random searches. I came back from court to a couple of officers who were not polite and quite gruff in the instructions to go back the way we came in, like a reverse arrest. We went back to the locker room where I got dressed in the clothes I came in with, no they hadn't been washed, it was indeed gross. I went back to the waiting area like when I came in and just sat in my stinky clothes from early spring, waiting to be released in the dead heat of summer. They gave me everything I had in a plastic bag, letters, some candy, my toiletries and pictures and the bag had no handle. It was like a desk garbage bag. They booted me out without my phone or ID but instructions to report downtown to my probation officer and gave me one bus token. 

  I was wearing pants and had lost a lot of weight so they wouldn't stay up and I had to hold the bag too and walk two blocks to a further bus stop because I couldn't stand the thought of waiting in the jail lot for another 45 minutes for a bus.  It didn't sink in that I was out and it was over until later the next day when my good friend bought me a cheap, greasy fast food meal.  It was the best damn thing I'd  ever eaten in my fucking life. It was the richest tasting food anyway and it was very hungry indeed. You could say I was hangry.

 That's the story of the time I went to jail. It wasn't fun and I didn't really see it as a fitting punishment for a lot of the crimes that people were there for but I didn't get gang raped or have to braid anyone's hair. There are a few interesting stories but they'll have to be for their own separate posts.  Night everyone and stay out of trouble!

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