# Financial disacuity

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/financial-disacuity/707949
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [December 22, 2014, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/financial-disacuity/707949 "2014-12-22T20:10:44Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 386

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### Author: ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2015, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/financial-disacuity/707949/386 "2015-01-05T13:42:42Z")

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> [@Dangerosa](#):
>
> Its hard to make that argument though when you have a social worker that is providing you with resources on how to do things like use a crockpot.

What? Your poor people get a _social worker?_

The only thing I got on my recent trip through the poverty tunnel was somehow who harangued me for not successfully finding work despite a college degree, tried to officially sanction me because I didn’t apply for a job where lifting 100 pounds at a time frequently during a shift was a basic requirement (I am a small, middle-aged woman - WTF?), and told me I should kick my husband out because he was also unemployed and probably wasn’t actually disabled, just faking it to be a freeloader.

Well - OK, some other folks did give me real help, but that was my “social worker”. Honestly. Of course, quality of social worker varies. (My first case manager was a former refugee from Ghana - HE was great, but then, he’d been in my shoes himself so had great understanding and empathy.)

It took me _five years_ to get help from the state on rewriting my resume and adapting my job search technique to the current environment, and that was largely to someone high up in the state bureaucracy FINALLY realizing that what “worked” for high-school drop outs with five kids wasn’t suited to people with college degrees who couldn’t find jobs in the Great Recession.

When I was laid off in 2007 I could get classes on child care (I don’t have kids) or getting my GED (I have a four-year degree) but not on how to cook on a budget, target my job search technique, or things that were actually _useful_.

Honestly, I sometimes think that, rather than teach crockpot cooking, they teach _microwave_ cooking. Not heating up a pre-made dinner, but _making dinner in the microwave_ which provides hot food quickly and if done from scratch is quite nutritious.

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