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improvising as prisoners do
Thursday, February 19 2009
I went with Gretchen today when she did one of her two weekly advising gigs in Eastern Correctional Facility near Ellenville. I was along in my role as computer consultant and my job was to survey an available room so I could design a layout for workstations, servers, a printer, and networking. Unlike at Woodbourne, though, all the actual wiring and such would be done in-(big-)house. I tried to bring a tape measure in with me, but since I hadn't cleared it beforehand, they wouldn't let me take it in. So I put it in a locker that I didn't actually lock, presenting an opportunity for a guard to yell at me later.
In the end, though, I was able to get a good sense of the spatial relationships of things using the foot by foot tile grid. I also used the grid in an existing computer lab to get a sense of how close things could be to each other in actual use.
I'm always a popular guy when I show up at the prison, mostly because Gretchen is so popular and she must say good things. I'm also popular because I can fix dead equipment. I'd brought no tools today, but I was still able to fix a computer with a loose floppy drive. After trying lots of unsuitable metal objects, I managed to use the clip of a clipboard as a screwdriver to open the box up. Then I used a paperclip as a hook to secure the drive in place. When in a prison, one improvises as prisoners do.
On the drive back north, we stopped at our friend Deborah's house just west of 209 in a rambling forested neighborhood of modest houses (some abandoned) and various hillwilliams and their artifacts. Deborah had set out a bunch of vegan snacks, and as we ate them, her enormous dog Juneau thought he might be able to benefit from our unfamiliarity with the house's dog feeding rules. Deborah has perhaps the steepest driveway we've yet attempted in this season; it's so steep in fact that Deborah is hunting for another place to live despite her car's all-wheel drive. Unless one is a major producer of crystal methamphetamines, there are numerous reasons to live closer to civilization than Kerhonkson.
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