The Tale of All Things

Sharon D stared wildly around the waiting room.

Her eyes were pleading for something, anything, before her strangled voice rose, begging to the smug women behind the glass windows separating reception from the clients scattered in the seats around the stale room.

Susan D gasped. ”My car! My car! Why are they towing my car?”

Tears were streaming down her checks, unstopped and untouched. She didn’t brush them away and they did not touch the hearts of the perpetrators, only the other members of the waiting room.

”You parked in a thirty minute spot and you have been here an hour.” The taller, grimmer receptionist announced Susan D‘s crime to everyone, triumph in her tone.

“But, but, I need to pick my kids up from school. I have to leave now.”

A mere shrug followed from the self-assigned keeper of the social service parking lot.

“But what am I going to do? What am I going to do?” Her anxiety, always just below the surface for this client, was moving towards panic. Her hands were twitching.

” Your car can be picked up from Hank’s Tow Lot on Riverside.”

”When?” She was grasping at any solution. Mothers in the scattered chairs around the waiting room knew she was homeless, broke, living off $25 and $40 loans from family members, ex-boyfriends, fathers of her kids, and living in her car right now. It was a small city and everyone trapped in the broken down homes in the southeast section of town knew each others’ business, even if they didn’t interact.

In fact, everyone in that room, on both sides of the glass, expanding to all the social services staff behind the doors, in small offices and cubicles knew. But the staff also knew that her monthly check had been held up for incorrect reporting. That check Susan D had promised to the network outside the building, the borrowers and lenders.

We all heard the grind and bump as the tow truck hauled his prize out of the parking lot onto Market Street.

“When? When can I pick it up?” Her brain was spinning through scenarios that would get her to school and to her kids.

“As soon as you get there. The driver’s taking it straight there.”

Susan D. turned hurriedly to the door.

”You will need $70 cash or credit card to pick it up, though,” came from that same smug voice, our greeter at Social Services.

Howling, the client left the building.

What was my most heinous job? The three months I spent as an intake worker at social services, for sure. Susan D’s check wasn’t held up for a month for incorrect reporting on her part, but because the new data entry clerk incorrectly entered data. I learned later that they could have cut an emergency check if they had wanted. That is the Tale of all Things.

I had lived poor. The check in the mail is hopelessly meaningless. Standing in the lobby on Susan D’s really really bad day, I had been in my new position for two weeks, still very much on probation and not part of anyone’s team. I needed the job. I told myself this every morning as I got out of bed, got my two children on the school bus, got everything ready for my bedridden husband, emptied bedpan and urinal, set lunch on a tray, all in time to walk into my cubicle at 8:15am.

I learned the hard way, that rules, many rules, ran everything at my new employers, city public social services. My fourth day I was written up for being 15 minutes late, and was severely reprimanded. I still hadn’t realized I was working as a guard and our clients were prisoners, and that I was still on probation, so was treated and spoken to as a trustee, which put me somewhere between guard and prisoner. But soon this was clear.

Staff seemed to be out to get clients, catch them out. I learned Susan D was one of their “poster kids” for screwing up, being under the threat of having her kids removed. “We“ stirred her stew pot always. A missed check means 60 days minimum before the next check.

There were reasons for all rules. I just hated supporting bad things. For thirty days I felt shocked and intimidated, and felt pretty bad for everyone involved. The next thirty days I job hunted. The last thirty days, I became a member of the underground, a few staff who silently worked to try and make people feel valued.

Then a remarkable, beautiful revolution happened, I obtained a new job which validated me and I felt good about what I was trying to do to make a difference, to promote positive change. In the years after I left social services, I would see my former fellow guards around town. Each time, the person would grab my hand and say something to me in a lowered voice.

“You got out! You got out! You are so lucky! It has gotten so worse. You are so lucky!“

I wonder about this still; I took a job to help people, yet the philosophy of that institution broke my heart and nearly my spirit. Yet this isn’t the point, I could get out. While the treatment to me was shameful, the treatment of clients was reprehensible, cruel, mocking and unprofessional. I have spent two decades in mental health advocacy, without all those swell benefits which seem to keep people in jobs they hate. But I know how crucial it is to give care, consideration, respect and grace to everyone, but especially on those “worst days” in life.

Susan D awakened me to what could be tolerated and what should never be tolerated.