Cuz its fucking killing me.

I’m an educator, and every day I go in and try to help people at their lowest points turn things around. And every day I have to watch them be abused by the pigs and admin, or get shortchanged by our schools need for higher numbers of graduates. I thought I fuckin hated cops before. As a tankie, I thought I was used to The Weight of Being Objectively Correct All The Time. Lemme tell ya, you don’t know the half of it.

The Inmates haven’t had AC or Heat in their dorms for years. Nobody is exactly sure when it died, but the nicest estimate is 3 years. Interestingly, its the same for the education building. If you go up to admin though, well, that’s a perfect 71 degrees, every day of the year. There was money set aside to fix it early this year. Somehow that got spent on cutting down all the nearby trees, right before summer. They said it was because it was too easy to hide contraband, but it just so happened to make things quite a bit warmer all around the facility. A coincidence, I’m sure.

Bugs and other vermin also had quite an uptick recently. Surely it had nothing to do with the fact their homes (the trees) are gone. Just keep a fly swatter nearby, and if a snake gets through the cracks, well you can always call security.

Luckily! We’ve got a top-notch lab, at least as far as prisons go. Photoshop 7! Adobe Acrobat! And…computers. They exist. They’re not really good enough for the decade old programs, but technically they do run. And! its only twice a month when they’ll do an unannounced “refresh” of a random computer, without warning. All that means is that they’re going to wipe windows, do a fresh install, refuse to install the things we actually need (like PS7) and also not save any of the students’ work. Sure hope I’m caught up on grades.

Don’t worry though, I’ve got all day to teach. Unless there’s a lockdown for unspecified reasons. Yeah, sure, those unspecified reasons usually end up being “Captain [REDACTED] didn’t want to walk outside more than once”, and yes, sometimes that means they cut my class short because of it, but other than that. Its not like I have to hear them talking about which inmates they’d fuck, or hear them curse an inmate out to their face for an untucked shirt, or watch these pigs get walked out in handcuffs when they eventually do fuck (rape) an inmate or bring in drugs, or see the black eyes of my students who said the wrong thing. Did my student sleep in? Or are they in medical with bruised lungs? Who fuckin knows.

I nailed the interview for this job because I told a story about teaching my daughter. I wasn’t even really “teaching” as much as I was just playing with her, totally absorbed in her current interests (dinosaurs, of course). Her love of the subject meant I didn’t really need to do anything. Just be there, as she told me “tee tops. three horns on head. steg-so-saurus, spikey tail!” She makes things so easy. My students here are the same way. They have a drive. They want to be there, every day, and most days they have to literally fight a cop to do it.

So I guess I’ll be there too.

At least until it kills me.