Sounds Great

I’ve noticed that people in law enforcement, much like people in the military, have a tendency to use terms that sound quite impressive to refer to relatively ordinary things. They say “egress” instead of “exit,” and they seem to have acronyms for everything. I was amused by one example of this earlier in the week.

There’s been a big issue at one particular jail about attorneys wanting to do visits in the actual pods where the inmates are housed. For some reason, jail staff hate it. They would rather have the lawyers visit their clients in little visitation rooms where an officer has to open a trap every time the lawyer needs to hand the client something. I have no clue why.

Because the lawyer and client are separated by thick glass and visibility can be limited in those rooms, lawyers were getting inside-the-pod visits when they had to show the clients videos. Unfortunately, someone at the jail decided to put a stop to that.

A relatively new sign in the jail now explains that, to facilitate lawyers being able to show videos to their clients in the regular visitation rooms, the rooms are being “retrofitted with a shelving system.” I, for one, was quite impressed. Until I saw the retrofitted shelving system, that is.

The updated rooms now each have a plastic milk crate turned upside down with a piece of plywood bolted on top. They didn’t even go to the trouble of painting any of it, and it doesn’t look like they did a very careful job of affixing the plywood. Hardly the kind of thing they had to “retrofit,” and certainly not something anyone in their right mind would call “shelving system.”

I’d accuse them of sesquipedalianism, but that somehow seems a bit hypocritical.