Observations at the Welfare Office

A visit to the Welfare Office:

The office is arranged so that filing cabinets form a corral or enclosure behind which the workers are hidden from the clients, and vice versa.

Staff walk around a lot but seem not to go anywhere, and they talk more to each other than to clients.

The people are simply there.  They are used to being here, resigned to the way it works (or doesn't).  They wander about, looking at each other and sometimes ask questions of clerks who look back as though no one had spoken.

No one admits to being bilingual.  They must be asked a second time.

Periodically, people become indignant, then return to the Daily News.

They seem conditioned to resignation interspersed with half-hearted complaint, expressed to the person next to them on the bench.

The time is oppressive and you will read almost anything to help make it pass.

Seats are arranged in the waiting area so that no one faces anyone else.

All look straight ahead at no one looking back.

There are quite literally mountains of papers and files.  More than an army might read in a millennium, assuming they even wanted to.

Workers engage in discussion about the latest procedure and the most recent change in it.  What may be attempts to facilitate the system seem instead to make it more complex.

Bathrooms are locked.

Every worker must ask his or her supervisor everything.

Supervisors seem most supercilious, and I suspect they carry their lunch in attache cases.

Some workers seem afraid they see the spectre of their past or of who they might have become in the sad and hopeless people outside the corral.  It makes them more angry than compassionate.

Up and down stairs.  Lines to get on lines.  Round and round the halls.  Not allowed on the elevator alone.  Steel chairs and too straight benches.  Staring at heads that stare at heads.

As soon as you leave they will call your name.

The office is decorated with all the latest posters, from the government.

Staff is either quite well dressed or frightfully sloppy.  Either may seem the latest in style.

More often than one should be, people are told to come back tomorrow, only earlier than today.