Last Tuesday I finally got up the ambition to go to the Social Security Office.
The doctor advised me to get the process going seeing as I have degenerative disc disease. Yeah right, okay, um. Well this sucks.
And so last Tuesday I went to the brand spankin’ new SSO, new state of the art building, new parking lot.
We were the only vehicle in the parking lot. It was about 2 in the afternoon. I walk in and the first person I meet is a police officer packing a gun. I’m thinking, this is Fergus Falls. Population 12,000.
And why would the SSO need this type of protection? Are people that crazy? Anyway, I look at him, he looks at me and says, “Sign in over there.”
I looked to where he was pointing and it was this black kiosk? Is that what they’re called? A little island computer doodie that asks me three questions: Do you have an appointment? Do you want an appointment? Do you want to talk to someone? I clicked on I “want to talk to someone.”
This little machine on the right spits out a paper that said I was number 65. I looked around the room, wondering where the other 64 were.
I was the only person/customer in there. The officer told me that my number would be called next. I’m not kidding.
I sat down in a chair that was facing the window, bullet-proof glass, I think, that enclosed the social security workers that I figured I’d be talking to. I sat right in their eye view. While they were talking about the happenings over the 4th of July, the food, someone getting drunk and hurting their shoulder, the boy getting sunburned, I looked around.
Nice shop. Important shop. Must be. Armed guard, bullet-proof glass, numerical punch combination lock on the main door to the offices. Whew!
This is damn important.
And while I sat there waiting, those women just kept talking about potato salad and their teen-aged daughters, and did you see what she was wearing?
This important place was nicely air conditioned, so I didn’t mind, although I started thinking about our tax dollars.
And the longer they talked the more unimportant I began to feel. Feeling unimportant in an important place that your tax dollars are supporting…well, I think I understand why they have an armed police officer there.
Some people, customers, or taxpayers might get a little fidgety. Not me. I just sat there in the wonder of it all.
After about 10 minutes, one of the women must have gone back to her own desk.
Then I heard, I am not kidding, my number being called out over an intercom. “Number 65! Number 65!”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Here I am, the only one in the room, a room the size of Pizza Hut, (in fact, Pizza Hut is right across the street), and it takes an intercom, apparently, to get my attention when I have been in her eye sight for the past 10 minutes. I am amused.
I walk up to the bullet-proof glass and here is this young woman speaking into a microphone that looks like something a DJ would use. She asks me how she can help me. I tell her that I need the forms to fill out for Social Security Disability. She tells me that I’ll have to make an appointment. I tell her that I will just fill them out online instead.
I left there thinking, “Wish I had her job.” A receptionist for the Social Security Office. A Federal employee. Sweet.
I have since decided to change my career path.
Jan 2, 2009
Encounter With Social Security "Computer Doodie" In Minnesota
I missed this one from last summer in The Daily Journal of Fergus Falls, MN, but it is still relevant:
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7 comments:
And yet, Mr. Hall, you go on and on castigating SSA for trying to close some of these small, extremely non-productive offices. We have one of these seven-person offices nearby. They insist on appointments to file claims, and will not assist in filling out medical background forms. The place is almost always deserted. There are SSA offices twenty miles to the east, fifteen miles to the north, and twenty miles to the south. What a waste.
I also hope that people do not judge the agency by what happened at one office in a short period of time. The fact that he/she had number 65 indicates that during the previous five hours those service representatives had served 64 other people and this may have been the first lull in the day. I hope that the matter of him having to wait 10 minutes in an otherwise empty reception area was raised with local management, and not just in the local paper.
I also agree with the previous poster that the agency needs to close or relocate some of these small offices. The problem has usually been that Congressmen, especially in the House, will fight the closure of any office in thier districts tooth and nail because they feel it will hurt their chances for re-election.
While the distances between offices can be fairly large in Minnesota the Fergus Falls office is quite close, 50 miles, (by rural MN standards) to the Alexandria office. While it would make sense to combine the two offices into one, it won't happen because the Fergus Falls office is in the Denver Region (as part of the Fargo district)and the Alexandria office (as part of the St. Cloud district) is in the Chicago Region and their is too much competition between the regions to "give up" any territory.
Computers are the only reason SSA has managed to remain functional at all when you consider how the staffing has been reduced while the workload exploded due to the aging of the baby boomers. They have not yet had that big an effect on the retirement workloads but the older we get the more likely we are to have health problems and injuries and the disability claims workload has mushroomed. Even without considering the growth in workload the staffing levels have generally been going down.
That is the whole trick--reduce the staffing until the office is "too small" to keep open. Ignore the fact that there is a huge backlog of cases sitting unworked--just close those small offices, instead of hiring enough staff to do the work.
Oh, and if he really was in an office with the enclosed reception area with the bulletproof glass, he could not have heard any conversations between employees on the other side. Poetic license, perhaps?
And the numbers also revolve from one to 99 and over again throughout the day.
I wonder how many people sitting in field offices would be thrilled to have to wait only ten minutes for their appointments?
The numbers no longer revolve from 1 to 99 and back to 1. In most offices the computer now assigns numbers for different types of callers, e.g. N101, N102, etc. for those there to apply for an SSN . . . (that is why the computer asks why the person is there). Most, if not all, offices have a program called Vistor Intake Program (VIP) installed which keeps track not only of how many people visited, but also the type of interview, the name of the caller, the employee who conducted the interview, the time they checked in and got a number, the time they were called for an interview, the time the interview was completed and if they talked to more than one employee, say a service representative and a claims representative, the time the second interview began and ended. In the future, VIP is also expected to track such information for phone interviews as well. Part of the reason for this is that it is difficult at times to convince some Congressmen that SSA truly needs more staff. Oh, and by the way, the majority of visitors to SSA offices are not there to file a claim, many are replacing Social Security Number cards, notifying SSA of changes of address or income if they are already receiving benefits, protesting notices that they have been overpaid, etc.
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