Sorry it’s been so long lince I’ve written - agin. I’ve just been extremely busy between work and making christmas cards for all the good little boys and girls out in the free world.
I started work at UNICOR last Tuesday and while it’s a pointless trained monkey job - you can’t beat the pay. Within 3 months, I’m pretty much guaranteed to be making $110+ a month, depending on how quick I can get on a machine. Even with them taking half of every month for restitution, I’m still making enough where after the new set of head phones I’m buying myself for christmas and a pair of glasses (roughly $200 between the two), I shall be able to save a decent amount.
Thanks for the wonderful gifts that you and Mom gave me, enabling to buy art supplies. I won’t have to go to the store hopefully until at least July. So, once again, thank you! I’ve been doing about 4 hours of card work a day (more on weekends) to get all of them made for all the “relatives” who want them. Theoretically if I were selling them, I could have made more in the past three weeks than my combined prison wages for the whole time I’ve been here. Pathetic, huh! And it’s all due to the kindly gifts of you and Mom. :)
So that’s how my days have been spent lately. 8 hours a day in UNICOR putting lace locks on the PT shorts for the Army and Airforce, and undertaking the precise and highly intellectually stimulating task of putting 72 of the packaged shorts into a cardboard box. It took long minutes of training and study in order for me to be able to successfully complete these tasks, but through very little mental effort on my part and due to the knowledge that the dreadfully important physical conditioning of our troops rested not quite solely on my not quite broad and somewhat capable shoulders, I was able to shut down 87.6 percent of my mental functions to achieve the zombie-like state necessary to my duties. Hopefully within a month or so I will be promoted to an equally mind numbing but somewhat more prestigious and higher paying job of sewing some parts of the shorts over and over again throughout the day or snipping the threads of hundreds of pairs of shorts over and over again. Of the things we have to look forward to! I get paid according to the number of shorts I do in a day. Most guys who get piece rate make between $5 to $8 a day. Not too shabby.
And it’s not quite as bad as I make it out to be. The day goes extremely quick and since I know quite a few of the guys in the factory and they have a radio playing all day on the loudspeakers, you’re able to take your mind off the work pretty easily. Also the fact that if I don’t show up, I get fired and sent to the hole, will help to train me for whatever job I get when I get out. Because most likely I will not like my initial job any more than I like this one.
How’s everything going for you? Did you and Joy ever fill out that application for her to be put on my visiting list, because I have to be notified that she’s on there - although I don’t know how long it takes for her to be cleared once you mail that into the prison. Hopefully it doesn’t take too long.
Hope everything is going good for you both. Have an excellent Christmas!