My work at Unicor is going fine. I work in Customer Service entering, reviewing and amending contracts. During my first month, which is probationary, I make 23 cents per hour and work from 7:30-14:30 with a half hour for lunch. I will get bumped to $0.46/hour in about a month. Unicor is a government owned entity that makes clothes for prisons, wiring harnesses for the military, furniture for the government and a few other things that I do not yet know about. Lexington is where the office that handles all of this business is located and there are probably about a hundred people working in Customer Service, AR, AP, Procurement, etc. There is also the shop where they make the wiring harnesses and this probably employs another 150-200 people. As you can imagine, a company managed by corrections officers, staffed by prisoners making less than 50 cents per hour is not a model of efficiency. There are literally guys there who only work about an hour a day and spend the rest of their time talking about their case with other non-workers. Listening to this for 2-3 hours per day is almost comically difficult. Coming from the background I am from, I give it 100% and by the end of my shift, I am mentally tired.
I am now up to 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups per day. I can do the sit-ups non-stop, but can only do 25-30 push-ups in one rep. Unlike some people, I go all the way down, so I am getting the full “push-up experience.” Once we star going outside, I can start doing pull-ups and fast-walking/jogging.
Reading books has taken a back seat for a few days. Several of my Economist magazines showed up at once, so I am reading them. Another inmate also got a backlog of Wall Street Journals that he shares with me, so I am reading them to get caught up a bit on the news. This week I will finish the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Great Gatsby. I will be doing the WSJ crossword puzzle with Mark & Gino on Sunday after dinner.
I got my hair, beard & mustache cut by the prison barber this afternoon. He is Hispanic from my floor, but does not speak much English. When done, I paid him with a book of stamps (20 stamps that has street value of about $8) and he said something about two. I thought he was charging me two books for a haircut, which was a pretty steep price. When I got back to my room, one of the other guys that speaks Spanish explained to me that Carlos charges 1 book for 2 haircuts. That is a better deal.
One funny issue is that guys who have come from high & medium security, will flush the toilet multiple times while using it. It is considered good etiquette to do this so that the flushing toilet will help to suck down any bad smells in the stall. At the low security prisons, the low prisoners don’t do it, but those who came from a high or a medium still do it.
