Honi soit qui mal y pense

I promise, "No more wedding pictures for awhile," and in the words of Elvis C., "My aim is true."


This past week, as I paraded a young lying-sack-of-an-excuse student down the corridor in search of the school principal for a GED verification, I observed two convicts speed-walking my way.

"What's going on?" I asked. Both inmates stopped.

"I don't know who he thinks he is," the inmate with the burnt face said, "but he ain't gonna talk to me any old way." He was referring to the Dirt Man, aka, the horticulture instructor standing at the other end of the hallway near the entrance of his classroom. The other inmate leaned against the wall, distancing himself from the conversation.

"I can't tell," I replied. "Looks to me like you're doing the chicken walk to get away from him." Now I had three convicts to deal with during mass movement in our school building. "You want his ID?" I yelled to the Dirt Man. Not that it really mattered. I knew both of them and could look up their inmate numbers.

"Yeah," the Dirt Man answered, still seething from whatever they had done.

"Give me your ID," I ordered the burnt faced inmate. He started flexing on me, but I stood my ground. And why not? Our corridors have security cameras recording our every nose-picking moment. He readily complied.

His road dog decided to speak. "All he was doing was weighing himself."

"Give me your ID as well," I said as an afterthought. He, too, complied.

I don't know if my lying-sack-of-an-excuse student followed me, but I delivered two ID's to the Dirt Man, who explained to me that the inmates in question had been in his critical tool area. Also, he informed me that the school principal was not in the building.

As I walked past the two inmates, a corrections officer asked, "Why are those two guys standing in my hallway?"

I shrugged my shoulders and replied, "Probably because the horticulture teacher has their ID's." By now, my new student fessed up that he did not have all of his GED scores, that he still needed to take the mathematics test. Such is an average day in the Michigan Department of Corrections.