What's like in Job Corps? Story Time Part 1?

So Job Corps is an American thing for you overseas Imgurians, but to summarize, it's a kind of government run program for people who just couldn't do it in regular school for some reason, it's designed for people between 16-24 - you get your GED/HS, and vocational training.

I went there when I was 21, I won't bore you with the details why I failed out of normal HS education, but I feel like Job Corps is a weird enough entity - it's not quite college, hell it's nothing like the "College experience", it's not boot or military school though there's a lot of similarities, it's own weird thing.

So first off, getting to Job Corps happens in two ways. The way I went in is the Voluntary way: I called a local office, have an interview, fill out some forms, including what vocational classes I'm interested and campuses of choice within the area - for me, I picked a campus that had computer networking and security as a class option, this was in a town about two hours from where I live - another campus would've taken near the Seattle area. You don't pay for anything - it's free.

The other way is basically you get assigned there as a court order. I can't say I know the details, but several people on the campus were not there voluntarily, and there's a huge difference - most of the ones who got Voluntold to attend end up getting into a lot of trouble with the staff, pick fights with other students before getting transferred out.

I would say

As both volunteers and assigned students fail out or never got into the normal system... you get some special cases.

We come in as groups, and we have a motley mix of people, one guy that's openly gay and more flaming than the human torch in a Teenager's Johnny/Peter fic, and then we had Seaman. It's not his real name but close enough.

Seaman was A Christian. He was very, very adamant about Being A Christian. Not just ANY Christian, but an Evangelical of some stripe - first he makes some snide remarks about gay guy when our entrance counselor comes in (more or less tells us the rules, herd us towards the health exams), he notices her Crucifix, and starts asking about if Catholics really believe they're drinking blood. Later we learned he was a former meth-addict and had converted in prison. He ended up getting kicked out of the program, after getting everyone in his dorm so irritated at him that they regularly pissed in his bed. He was also a major conspiracy theorist - Bush was the antichrist, the Masons were controlling the world that kind of thing.

So yeah... the bed pissing. The boys in all three men's dorm had struck on this form of punishment for other dudes that really ticked them off. This could be from being well an evangelical shithead like Seaman, just generally obnoxious like the person everyone calls Tweaker, or well this guy.

I had the pleasure of having an entire class of guys pissing in someone's bed to defend my honor. I got more or less pressured by one of my roommates to go out with this guy, I'll call him Clingy, because I can't even fucking remember his name. Clingy would not give me any space, if I wasn't in class or working in the rec room, he wants to be there every second. Me? I'm introverted, very independent, and need time to myself. If I don't go out immediately after class, he would call the dorm or send one of the girls in my dorm to get me (guys aren't allowed in Girl's dorms and vice-versa without good reason). He had also shown signs of controlling behavior, snatching the controller from my hand when someone let me try Fable when I made a mistake to 'show me how it's done'. I dumped him after about a week.

Yes, he was basically acting like a Barnacle that fast. Soon afterwards, I was in class and one of the guys asked if I had slept with Clingy - my expression said enough, and another fellow from the same dorm piped up that Clingy was saying that, but they thought it sounded fishy.

Next day one of them announced that Clingy had to sleep in a piss-soaked bed.

Uh... Thanks guys? I appreciate the sentiment... but you really didn't have to do that.

Now for the ladies! Good fucking god, the girls were pretty damn crazy too. So a huge chunk of the girls in my dorm were crazy superstitious, any sort of fortune-telling games would send these 4-5 girls fleeing the room screeching about bad spirits.

They were also morons, we had a girl transferred in - she is a Jew from a more traditional branch, and she ended up transferring out because she unfortunately got stuck with these bitches who were convinced her Hebrew was satanic chanting. They never bothered to ask her what it was, instead springing it up as part of their complaint during dorm meetings about people shouldn't be doing 'freaky shit'. Everyone tore them a new one. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let up, so the girl ended up transferring out.

One of my roommates in the latter half of my stay was Schizophrenic, and she would regularly go off her meds because she felt like it - and when she's off, she's very, very, intense in a way that was genuinely nerve wracking, and she would also make very poor decisions like trying to celebrate Mardi Gras in the Pacific Northwest wearing nothing but booty shorts and a belt around her tits, or smoking out the window - the latter got her kicked out two weeks before she was due to graduate.

Then we had another group who were fluent in Spanish - they would use it in the dorm's main room primarily to trash talk people right in front of them. One of our staff members happened to be fluent enough in Spanish to call them out

Okay, the people sound like a trash fire? I haven't even gotten to the sex yet. Oh good fucking god, half the campus was at it like rabbits, I'm actually shocked that no one ended up pregnant during my time. You're not suppose to be fucking, so people tend to come up with... ways to avoid the issue.

Now here's a serious problem. Some Job Corps Campus are 18+, ours is not. We usually have some 16-17 year olds, and there's one girl that's a special case that was like 15 or something - she was court-ordered to attend - she ended up in my dorm. Honestly, I think my dorm's the zone for the special cases.

That 15 year old was the biggest slut on campus in her very brief window of attendance, I know I heard her at least once going at it. Rest of the girls had accounts of walking in on her, or hearing her as well. And yeah, most of the guys she was going at it with were in their 20s, she just didn't fucking care they were creeps, or that they would get into major legal trouble. She ended up leaving after two months.

She wasn't the only one getting it on, she was just the most careless and didn't go through the pretense of dating. The Dumpster was literally the most common place for them to fuck, and I don't mean behind or near - but in - this was a big industrial dumpster about the size of a rail car and about six feet deep, not too hard to climb in or out, but still it's a god damn dumpster.

Another girl in my dorm (friend of schizophrenic) told us a secret of not getting caught: Cut a hole in some sweatpants, so a dude can just stick it in and drill without anyone looking naked.

Now Dating was another kettle of messed up. People hook up fast - unironically calling the person they're dating 'husband/wife', talk big about getting married, and usually dump them a month later once the honeymoon phase ends - it's so weird it's a mix of high school intensity, and college casualness wrapped up together.

Okay, that's enough about the people, it's late - next time I'll go into the following: Our Networking teacher clearly ran out of fucks, The Director is a moron, Everyone has shit taste in movies and Karaoke is serious business.

EDIT: Part 2 is up http://imgur.com/gallery/39jmY