[If you're joining this story already in progress, see the thread titled
"Bureaucracy + hospitalization = homelessness?"]
I asked my social worker here at Bedlam by the Schuykill to call my
caseworker at the housing authority about the possibility of an
extension. She repeated to him what she told me yesterday, that PHA had
to have the do***ent by tomorrow. BUT she told him something that
neither she nor the "customer" "service" person at Social Security told
me yesterday: that SSA will _fax_ the do***ent in time-sensitive
situations.
Sigh. That six-letter word before a name ("doctor" he's a Ph.D.)
apparently means a lot.
So I call SSA, which informs me that they will _not_ fax it directly to
PHA. In fact, they will only fax it to a machine of which I am in
proximity. I don't have a fax machine in my hospital room. The fax
machine on this floor is on the other side of the locked doors, and with
the unit looking like the psychiatric equivalent of a Keystone Kops
movie today no staffer was available to escort me to it.
While on the phone with SSA, I recall that I have a fax number with J2,
which receives faxes free of charge and e-mails them to you. I ask the
SSA staffer if that was acceptable, and she said it was as long as I
could tell her that I received the fax before she ended the call. So she
put me on hold, faxed it and then waited until it showed up in my inbox.
I couldn't print out and fax the do***ent today (see: Keystone Kops,
above), but I am promised that first thing tomorrow morning I will be
allowed to send the fax.
So it appears that once again I have narrowly escaped homelessness at
the hands of bureaucracy.
--
D.F. Manno | dfmanno@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words
are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by
destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people
will solemnly vote against their own interests." (Gore Vidal)
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