The Friday Afternoon Omigods
It never fails. Starting at about 4PM Friday afternoon, I get a near-constant stream of omigods.
“Oh, my god! I need to call my worker before the weekend!”
“Oh, my god! I need to get that letter/denial/copy of my birth certificate before they close!”
“Oh, my god! I need to clarify whether or not my Food Stamps are still open!”
“Oh, my god! I didn’t call in to get a replacement for my EBT card!”
Constant. “Who’s my worker?” “I need to actually TALK to a human being instead of a machine!” “I need my Food Stamps!”
What…you didn’t know you had to talk to these people ALL WEEK? You only just now, at 4:01 PM, realized that you have a huge emergency situation that MUST be taken care of immediately before everyone goes home for the long weekend?
Sorry, folks. Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part. To tell you the absolute, unvarnished truth, nothing constitutes an emergency on my part. We are not an emergency services agency. The fastest you can really expect anything to happen here (other than a possible food bank call, which is 24 hours) is 3-5 days (the target turnaround time on expedited food stamps). There is nothing that we do here or can give you, that constitutes emergency service. We are not EMTs, or doctors, or medical professionals, or your mother. You need to factor in the expected time to process anything when you’re dealing with DPW (or most government agencies).
So don’t, please, whine in my ear about how you have to ask for an extension on the time you have to send in your recertification for Food Stamps. The only emergency there is your procrastination that led you to ignore it for the six weeks you’ve had it. Don’t call me and say, “My semi-annual reporting form was due at the beginning of September. I never sent it in. Does that have something to do with why my Food Stamps were cut off?” Don’t call me and say that because I may actually injure something in my attempt NOT to shout “DUH!” into the microphone on my headset. I’d hate to do that.
We get that syndrome around here, too. It never fails that an URGENT REQUISITION MUST BE APPROVED. What’s beautiful about this is that I’m the last approver on the chain, so it’s always 5pm on Friday and I’m waiting for some fucking VP to click “approve” so I can receive it and do the same thing.
It’s never super-fire-critical at 10am on Tuesdays or anything. Argh.
You need to upgrade it from super-fire-critical to one of the following conditions in the database:
ASAP TOP PRIORITY
Bring Me A Rock
FIRE DRILL
REAL Fire Drill
Urgent Fire Drill
Very very important (to me)
Very very important (to my boss)
Rush immediately
Rush Limbaugh immediately
RUSH 2112
MAGENTA urgent
ARDENT ARGENT URGENT
ALL-CAPS BECAUSE IT’S IMPORTANT
Super important
Super DUPER important
SUPER DUPER POOPER SCOOPER IMPORTANT
THE CEO WILL SKULL-FUCK YOU IF YOU DON’T HANDLE THIS ASAP, ASSHOLE
I’m the switchboard operator for our county assistance office, which distributes welfare for the residents of this county. The general information line rings to my console, and I find out which caseworker or supervisor the caller needs to speak to, then transfer them. Food stamps is an allowance for the purchase of food, distributed monthly to qualifying clients. EBT is Electronic Benefits Transfer, a magnetic-stripe swipe card that holds the information that allows the client to access their food or cash allowance. This is an improvement over the old food stamps, which were actual paper coupons that were given out. EBT offers much less opportunity for welfare fraud.
Yeah, well, I’m a government worker who works 9 hour day flex time and gets every other friday off. My flex day hit just right to give me a four day weekend.
Why do you feel it necessary to quote a whole post to say “I don’t get it”?
Also, in reading the OP it’s quite clear that these are enquiries they have to handle which people think are an emergency close to closing time on a Friday. The particulars of the job really are not germane to the fact that a) The OP works in some sort of service area and b) Customers are too stupid to figure out that if they need something done, it’s better to call at 9 am on a Monday than 4:55 pm on a Friday.
I work with a lawyer who emerges from his office every day at around 4:45 and loiters near the exit, ready to engage any unwitting passer-by in aimless and agonizing conversation. If he’s not available there’s another guy whose office I have to pass to get to the exit who can pick up the slack. I think they plan ahead to make sure I can never leave before well after 5.
It’s worst on Fridays, of course.
I’d almost prefer an Omigod because at least with one of those you can fix it and go the fuck home. Instead, I have to stand and fiddle with my bike helmet and pretend to look interested, while stealing glances at the door and at my watch (trying to penetrate their total obliviousness to such social cues), until I work up the courage to walk away in mid-sentence, or until some other poor sucker comes along to distract them.
Sort of OT: Jayjay, what do people do when they actually have a bona fide emergency? When the refrigerator failed and they have three hungry children and nothing but spoiled food and boxed pasta? When the mailman managed to misplace their utilities shutoff notice until the deadline day for paying it? I can understand that your office processes people who have already got a case set up in the system – but what happens to the people with real actual emergency type problems?
To simplify EBT even more, it’s for all practical purposes a debit card which receives a “deposit” (of Federal USDA funds through the state and county social service programs) once a month, and which can only be used to purchase food – and not food ready to eat, by and large.
Jayjay, you’re a government employee: you clock out at your contracted time. You’re a switchboard operator; you’re not expected to solve any of their problems. If the lines are engaged, they’re engaged. You can’t do anything about it, so why worry?
Except when you don’t want to use the card for legit purposes. Then you can “sell” your card value for pennies on the dollar amount, Usually somewhere around 60 cents on the dollar or so.
Either someone gives you cash and shops with your card or an unscrupulous store owner gives you cash and rings through an amount on your card. The games continue.
But I digress and I feel the OP’s pain. I often get “urgent matters” late afternoons on Fridays. Too bad, it will have to wait until Monday.
For situations like that, I’ll usually transfer them to the supervisor-of-the-day, who will generally try to get them a food bank order or set them up with the appropriate charity organization/county housing office/etc. We do occasionally have people calling with situations like that, and I’m definitely not including them in the rant I posted. That’s just dumb bad luck, not “Oh, I forgot I needed to do this until the very last minute so I’m going to call the assistance office and demand to be served NOW.”
If they sell the card, they don’t eat, because if they then try to get a replacement card for their own use, the old card stops working immediately, and they’ll have a pretty upset dupe looking for them. And requesting replacement cards for “lost” or “stolen” cards too often will get you red-flagged. We have several printsheets up on the wall in the EBT room, “Do not make a card for this person”.
Plus they began about a year ago requiring lost or stolen cards to be replaced by a central facility (in TEXAS, for PA cards) and mailed to the client. So they’re out their card for 8-10 business days (which is usually at least a week and a half to two weeks in real time). If their card just stops working, and they have it, they can bring it in and get a replacement in the office in 15 minutes. We then destroy the old card.
