I'm a prison guard.

I am a prison guard. Now we aren't allowed to call ourselves guards, we're called correctional officers, like garbage men are called sanitation engineers. It was explained to me like this: “Dogs are guards, you’re an officer!” I’m not sure I fully understand this since our dogs at the prison are called K-9s and are also considered officers and most of the youngster guards here call each other “Dawg”. Correctional officer, prison guard, bull, screw, whatever, that is nevertheless what I do.

I did not grow up thinking “When I grow up I’m going to work in a prison!” Like many of my friends I had no idea what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Besides party. So when a school counselor suggested that because of my love for math and science I should become an Engineer I thought “Cool!” I enrolled at Purdue and became a Boilermaker. Since I liked a beer with a shot and Big Ten football I felt confident I had made the right choice. Two and a half years went by while I learned differential equations and had a physics professor demonstrate Faraday's law of induction by shocking the hell out me. Slowly I realized the horrible truth, Engineering didn’t have a damn thing to do with trains! So I decided to be a cowboy.

Again, I liked Budweiser and the Dallas Cowboys so I thought I had found my calling. Since I grew up on a ranch I was pretty sure I had no misconceptions about the job and because Ag Business was way easier than Engineering I could continue my minor; drinking and doing drugs. I knew that our ranch was primarily engaged in wool and lamb production but I was OK with that, I had already heard all the jokes. Things actually went pretty well until the 90’s when scientist figured out that the drought we were in was actually the norm and the barely adequate moisture of the 50’s through the 80’s was abnormally wet. That came along with Al Gore reinventing America, an America without a wool industry. So the family decided to sell and I had to find a new occupation. I mean being a cowboy is great if you’re the boss, but you sure ain’t going to make any money as a ranch hand.

Walmart was hiring so I applied, said I’d do anything. I mean one gets used to the finer luxuries of life like eating and I missed it. And Walmart, bless them, hires even the mentally handicapped. “Hello, welcome to Walmart!” I could do that. However apparently they did not agree, I didn’t even get an interview. Ditto the banks, hotels, convenient stores, etc. where I applied. So I looked for an industry that was desperate for workers. I became a truck driver. After an accelerated two week truck driving school I went to work for Swift Transportation Co. Now every other trucking company will send their drivers to school for at least a month and many veteran drivers think that’s too short, but as I said this industry is desperate for drivers. Now I’m not going to bad mouth Swift, every other driver on the road will do that. I’ll just say they did one thing right, after a year they fired me.

What other industry is as hungry for bodies? Corrections! And so I am a prison guard.