What It’s Supposed To Be Like

      A letter to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle:

This is a shoutout to the staff at Bozeman’s Social Security office, who recently helped me apply for retirement benefits in a professional and incredibly helpful manner.

My case was perhaps a bit more complicated than most in that I’d worked both in the U.S. and overseas, so there were several application details to figure out. I’d gotten a letter from the Denver-based Social Security office saying that my application process had stalled because they needed more information from me.

So I drove over to the local office, thinking, “More information? What more information?,” not knowing what to expect when I arrived (application delays? Denial?).