The all-day queue

This morning I had registration for classes. Last time I registered, I was finished within an hour. That time we were called down to the education building in groups of ten and three counselors from the nearby community college helped sign us up for classes.Not so today.

When the group of thirty that I was called out with arrived at the registration location, there was already a room full of guys waiting to register with one counselor to accommodate all of them. My group was hurried into another room to wait. After about thirty minutes of waiting, I got to move into another room. At this point it was 9:30 AM.

The activities in this room were completely disorganized, with no rhyme or reason to the order to see the counselor. We tried to remedy the situation by instituting a snake-like pattern to the line, but the counselor didn't realize that many at the head of the "snake" had just arrived. The tail was filled with guys who had been there longer than I had. She (the counselor) could have done it all alphabetically, which would have been easier and faster because the list in front of her was set up that way.

At 11:30, I still had fifteen guys ahead of me, so I went outside to tell a guard that many of us had missed lunch. At noon, a group came in that had a bunch of guys that were supposed to be in a class. They were rushed to the front of the line, thinking that they would be finished before the class was over. I told the counselor that some of us had been waiting for three hours and the new arrivals would be better off going to class and coming back after class. She agreed and sent them on their way.

At 12:30,a group of us left to go eat at the dining hall. They were out of food when we arrived so we had to wait for chicken patties to be cooked. Thirty minutes later, we got our food and were ready to go back to the education building, but it was count time so we had to wait another thirty minutes before we could try again to register.

By 2:00PM, I had finally finished registering for classes, five hours after being called down there. Perfect example of state inefficiency. The whole time I was waiting I should have been asleep. I have test at 5:30 that I will probably be very tired for. I hope they figure out how to be better organized for the next time around. Even in prison, five hours is a long time to do nothing.