Almost two months ago my family was scheduled to have a phone interview with our caseworker. Before the scheduled date we made a phone call to report our number change. The person helping us said the number had been changed and we waited for our call. It never came. My mother sat with the phone in her hand the ENTIRE day. There was no call. The following day we called in to see what had happened. Under our case # it said our caseworker had tried to call multiple times to the wrong phone number. Once again we let the person on the other end know that we did in fact change our number and reported it to them a few days earlier. This person promised s/he had changed the number to the correct one and scheduled us for a new phone interview.
This time our caseworker was given five days Monday-Friday from 8-5 to call us and once again my mom had the phone by her side the entire time. We never received the call. Finally we decided to go downtown and talk to our caseworker in person. We waited in line for about an hour then sat in a waiting room for about another hour.By 2:00 we were told that our caseworker was going to lunch and she would be back by 3. We could stay and wait, or come back another day. We chose to stay and wait. At 3 our caseworker sent an email to the woman we had been talking to and told her that she would call us the following Wednesday between 3:45 and 5. Yet, again the number was in our file as the old number. We gave this new person our new number and she wrote it down as well to hand it to our caseworker. As usual my mom had the phone in her hand from 8 until 5 just in case. We never received a call, so we called in and asked for our caseworker's supervisor.
At this point we wanted our caseworker fired. Obviously she was not doing her job and we were (and still are) suffering for it. Finally a month and a few days after our original phone interview was scheduled we got a call from our caseworker. My mom had previously sent in papers that we had been asked for in a letter sent to our home. While my mom was on the phone with our caseworker the woman (who had stated she did not receive these papers, ever) was opening the envelope AS SHE SPOKE WITH MY MOTHER. These important papers had been on her desk the entire time and she was ignoring them. She gave us a list of papers that needed to be faxed over to her. My mom actually went into overdraft sending these documents to this woman.
A couple days with no word from anyone went by and my mom started running out of her extremely important medications. We once again began calling in trying to make sure that our caseworker was actually doing what she said she was going to do, but the only thing anyone kept saying was "your caseworker has 30 days to process your claim." 30 days was way too long for my mom to go without her meds. We began to panic. We called in once more and spoke to a woman. She said there was nothing that she personally could do, but she would email her supervisor and he would give us a call back. Of course, we still have not received a call.
We went down to once again try to get some help from someone in person. We waited in a line for over an hour. Finally our caseworker's supervisor came out to talk to us. At first I was relieved. I thought finally someone was going to help us. This woman wouldn't even shake my mother's hand. She kept saying, "if you need to file a complaint go to the fifth floor" as my mom was talking to her. My mom was trying to explain how much we needed assistance immediately and the woman walked away. I said, "Please don't walk away while my mom is talking to you." She turned around and got the security guard to remove us from the building. We waited over an hour and a half total to be treated like low-life, scum by this awful woman. We were practically on our knees begging for help from this woman, and she couldn't even bring herself to shake my mom's hand. It was the most humiliating moment of my life, and we are still out of food and my mom is almost entirely out of all of the medications she needs in order to survive. I don't know what I can do about this, but people like my caseworker and her supervisor should NOT be working in a place where people come for help. They are the two most heartless people I have ever met in my life and I hope they lose their jobs. If not for how they treated my family, for how they do their jobs overall.
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