The Dynamic Duo

Would would we do without computers? Well, we definitely wouldn’t run our Calvin Camp Prison Store. For…..........about a month now. I wonder how they did it BEFORE computers….........did they have prison stores then? Were the inmates given actual money to spend? This is something I would like to know.
in our last episode, you may recall, I was going, for the second time, to Windy Camp to run store purchases for Calvin. This I accomplished, inputting some 120 inmate orders into the computer there, as well is inputting all the merchandise shipments we had received since the last time I’d been to Windy. Jackie and her clerks were, again, very pleasant and helpful. It is an imposition to have someone else using her computer, and Windy’s computers had also been down, though only for a couple of days, but Jackie couldn’t have been more supportive. It took me a while, and my hands were aching from all the typing by the time I was finished. At the end of the “ticket” (orders) entering, it is necessary to print a summary screen that lists totals for each item sold, and a numbered list of all inmates who purchased. You do this by hitting “5” and “enter” on the computer, so we insiders call this sheet “The Five”. I know, it sounds kind of stupid, but I don’t know what else to call it. When I did “The Five”, I was astounded by the total amount of purchases. It was $1600, and I thought it should have been far higher. Then I noticed that only 55 inmate purchases were reflected in this “Five”. What happened to the rest???? They were simply gone. Vanished. Hiding in the nebulous, shadowy forests of “Five-Land.” Finally we gave up.
The next day I realized I was missing the “Five” I had printed, and had to ask Jackie to look around her store for it. She found it torn in half in the garbage can. “Could you please tape it together and fax it to me?” I desparately pleaded. She could, and did. Then I called my boss. He was able to somehow find my missing “Five”, print it, and fax it over. “By the way,” I asked him, “what do you call “The Five”? There has to be another name for that printout that sounds a little less insipid.” “No,” he said, “Everyone just calls it “The Five.” If you called it something else I probably wouldn’t know what you were talking about.”
Altogether, we passed out some $4500 worth of store merchandise the following day. I am SO glad to have Joe back. It is making my job (when I can do it) so much easier. Also, he knows everything that’s going on around camp, at least some of which he tells me. The inmates were so happy to have store that they cheered when I walked in the camp. They also made me a second card, even better than the first. About 25 of them signed it. It felt great being hero for a day.
The computer plan, the last I heard, was that I would have a working controller unit waiting for me that next Tuesday, Monday being a Holiday, when I arrived at work. Of course it wasn’t there. “Change of plan,” Jackson informed me after I placed a “what the heck is going on” phone call to him. “Tomorrow you will have a brand new computer. The whole camp will be linked to the Satellite System and you will be online.” Right.
Wednesday I was cautiously optomisitc, especially after getting a phone call from a camp officer telling me the MIS people were there. “They will be ready for the store at noon. It should only take a couple of hours.” They were in the store by 2:30. It only took about an hour and a half, but the results were disappointing, to say the least. “We forgot to bring your new computer,” Eric informed me as they lugged in a clunky old monitor, kekyboard and mouse. “We just forgot to load it in the van!” They hooked everything up and the mouse wasn’t responding. I volunteered to go home and get a new, cheap mouse I’d been storing in my desk. “Right after you left, this mouse started working,”Eric said cheerfully, but installed my mouse anyway.
The other Tech, Ryan, was tall, lanky and wore his sunglasses on the back of his head. He sat down at my keyboard and started typing. Now followed a long period of Ryan typing, waiting, frowning, and making kind of pouty fish lips with his mouth while drumming his fingertips against his cheekbones. “I’m having trouble creating a sign-on for you,” he admitted. “We’ll go work on some other stuff and get back to this later.”
I had a commitment that night to lead Weight Watchers, and I had to be out of there by 4:30. I told this to Ryan and Eric. “We don’t need to get back in the store. We will create your sign-on for Novell and leave it with the LT. Then you call Matt and put in a work order to get a sign-on for the Store System.” A work order? That sounded like time. Like waiting time. I called Matt. “No, I’ll just help you and fill out the work order later. We all know getting your store back up is a high priority.” You could have fooled me.
So, this morning I was at the camp at 7:30 am, ready to go to work. The prison computers are down statewide. Seems there was a little problem last night when they were trying to link Calvin up on the Satellite. Why am I not surprised?

Still outa Work,
UltraMom