I'm Not Even Kidding, This Is True

My true story of having the craziest prison job at Club Fed

To give some sense of how incredibly ludicrous so much of our job was, I’m going to jump ahead and tell you what I did on my last three days there. For those readers who may be uninitiated, I was a federal inmate and my work assignment was on base at Vandenberg AFB. There was not always intelligent things for us to do, so sometimes work had to be made up.

On my last three days, they’d already gotten a replacement for me driving the mower, so I had to be placed somewhere else. I was dropped off at some kind of workshop building. A handful of civilian contractors worked there. A nice older guy named Jim greeted me and showed me around.

There was genuinely nothing there that needed to be done, but I had to remain inside the building. Jim thought a bit, then took me to a glovebox used for sandblasting small items, and the gloves were a bit worn out and needed to be replaced. He had the new ones, and it was a trivial matter to unclip the old ones and replace them. Jim told me to get started, and he’d be back to pick me up for lunch. Which was 3 hours away. “Jim, do you really want me to spend 3 hours replacing these gloves?”

“Why no,” he said, while nodding his head yes, in large obvious movements, “that would be ridiculous.”

I spent three hours replacing the gloves.

But then I had to spend the next day there also. Jim found a little table that they had painted black recently, and figured there were worse things than giving it a new coat. In fact, why not two new coats.

It was some kind of spray paint that said to wait four hours between coats. 90 seconds later, I’d finished applying the first coat. I then sat in a chair and stared at it — for four hours. Yes, it is an honest fact that my job that day was literally to watch paint dry.

But it was the third day that really took the cake.

Evidently Jim had called Kenny and said there was honestly nothing more he could think of for me to do there, though I was welcome to come sit and read or watch TV for the day. But Kenny had a final ace up his sleeve. There was, on base, one final job that anyone could do at any time…

It was to go pick up trash at the dump.

Yes, you read that correctly. Vandenberg had its own landfill where garbage was taken. It was like any other you've seen; great piles of trash, and a bulldozer here or there moving things around. Kenny dropped off me and one other guy who was also on his last day. He gave us those spiked sticks and trash bags, and told us to pick up trash. The idea was that the roads between the giant piles of garbage were intended to be kept clear, which was silly because the roads were themselves made of trash. Your tax dollars at work.

And so we spent an entire six hour work day strolling around the dump, chatting, and going through the motions of picking up trash at the dump. Whenever we filled our trash bags, we poured them out and started over. All in all, it was not a bad day. We got to be outside and it was nice weather. But I got to take one thing with me: the knowledge that henceforth, whenever I think I’m having a bad day at work, or doing anything that seems nonsensical or unproductive, I know that at least it’s better than picking up trash at the dump. Someone is probably there doing that right now.