Town of Pelham Public Library

Getting the government to answer the phone

The wait time for the state benefits line was estimated at two hours, and I am sixty nine years old, and I did not have two hours, and the letter demanding documentation had a deadline inside ten days. This collision, the slow institutions and the ticking deadlines, is the defining annoyance of dealing with the government at our age, and here is the toolkit that has gotten me through three separate battles, with Social Security, the state tax people, and the pension office. First, the machine drafts the letters. Each agency has its own language it respects, and you tell the program the agency, the situation, and the ask, and it writes in the register that gets filed rather than the register that gets dismissed, with the claim number in the right place, which is not where you would guess. Second, the checklist. Paste in the agency's own requirements page and ask what I must include for this to be complete, in order, and the machine builds the checklist, and the missing item it catches is the one that would have cost a month. Third, the rehearsal. Ask it to play the difficult clerk and make me answer the three questions they always ask, and my phone calls got shorter and better. Fourth, and this one is quiet, the documentation habit. It drafts the letter after each call, date, time, the name they gave, what was said, so the file builds itself. What it is not is a lawyer or an inside connection, and anything with a hearing in it gets the professionals. But the ordinary siege work, the letters, the checklists, the paper trail, is now done by a clerk who works at midnight and never sighs. Three battles, three wins, all from the kitchen table.

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