Social Security's central offices in the Baltimore-Washington area are closed today because of weather conditions. Many field and hearing offices along the East coast are also closed. Social Security has a website where these closings are supposed to be listed but this system has almost completely broken down. As an example, no office closings are shown in North Carolina, where I am, but I'm pretty sure that all field offices and hearing offices in the state are closed. It's obvious to me that there must be dozens of office closings in other states that are also unlisted. Somebody needs to get this system working properly.
4 comments:
Maybe, just maybe, massive electrical outages throughout the South and Mid-Atlantic regions have disrupted normal communication/reporting/updates. Just a wacky theory circulating here in the real world.
Not at all! Here in the "real world," I called the Charlotte ODAR several times between Wednesday afternoon (when we knew they were closed)and Thursday morning (when I had 2 hearings scheduled) just to be prudent. When I got to a recording, it said that the office would be closed on Tuesday, December 18th. An updated automatic message would have helped.
Well 2:32, the unfortunate truth is that our national phone contractor stinks (I'm being polite). To change a message can take several attempts and even when it works perfectly (almost never) it can take up to 30 minutes to the message to actually play when someone calls. This system has several other problems that I won't bore you with. Talk about the need for a Congressional hearing. Your tax dollars at work. NOT! But HQ doesn't want to hear about it. Sterling leadership, indeed.
There does need to be a better solution to the website. It eventually updates throughout the day but it's not particularly useful to let people know at 2 in the afternoon offices in North Carolina have been closed all day. It also seems rare for the hearing office page to update, it will show say all field offices in Pittsburgh are closed but not that the Pittsburgh hearing office is closed.
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