A bubble pops: how I screw up in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

Up early. My body has loosened up lately; mysteriously I am a lot more limber. I suspect it may be something to do with diet; pessimistically I suspect it may be a side effect of something that is actually dietarily regrettable, but I’m not sure what. One of my diabetes medications is supposed to increase expulsion of glucose in the urine; I’m guessing that’s why my pee smells so weirdly fresh and nice lately, or that’s my official guess, though I know of no reason why it would have gotten so much nicer in the last two months.

I messed up, and I’m worried about it. Quite worried.

And it’s exactly the sort of brainless messup I dread the most, because it’s the sort of ADD thing that has always haunted me, on scales little and big - something vanishing from my mind like a popping soap bubble. Things do that.

Worst of all, it’s in a matter of official paperwork.

It didn’t do any damage - I don’t think it can be interpreted as me twisting things to my own benefit - and it may in effect actually turn out to be nothing (but maybe not)… I don’t care if it’s nothing. It’s exactly the sort of thing that I have had in mind that must not happen. I’m a very uptight, honest person and I’m a stickler for doing paperwork right. And - pop.

See, what happened was…

My freelance copyediting thing has failed to take off and has slowed to nothing. In the last few years, quite a bit of nothing.
I’m not a businessman. I’m good at the work when it is happening, but I never got a handle on how to keep it happening or what to do when it’s not; then things just get lost in my perpetual daze. For a while, work was just showing up and I didn’t even know how; it’s not doing that anymore.
Well, all right then. It’s time to figure out how to get a regular job. (I dread how my head works under those circumstances - I turn out to be either great at jobs or awful at them - but one thing at a time.)
But anyway. To paper over the lean times I’ve been on food stamps. At my family’s urging I applied; I was surprised when I was approved. I’ve been very punctilious about the various requirements, reporting my income, etc.

Now, there’s peculiar background to this story. A few years back I went to the dentist for an abscess, and they took X-rays and they told me that the bone holding my teeth was just gone and the thing to do was to pull all my teeth and to give me dentures. They pulled the one tooth that was giving me trouble, and they told me they would call me in for the rest; they were just waiting to get the opinion of a periodontist.
And then… they just never called me back at all.
??
And… well. I like eating things with my teeth. I would have gone in totally passively for the procedure if they had called me and arranged the appointment, but when they didn’t call… calling them to “push the river” was not the sort of thing that just appears atop my to-do pile.
And when you’ve been advised that the dentist is going to simply pull all your teeth on next contact, you certainly don’t contact the dentist for any minor reason.
So things just sat for about three years.

(It turns out that that branch closed after I went there!)

So.

There have been fewer and fewer big book-editing checks to report to the food stamp people. For more and more time the past few years, my only income has actually been selling blood plasma. There’s a category in the food stamp update forms where you can list that.

About six years ago my doctor said to get a colonoscopy, which I did. Of course I reported the procedure to the plasma center afterward, and I got a surprise - I was deferred from donating plasma (they still call it donating) for 16 weeks. If the clinic had used a disposable endoscope there wouldn’t have been a problem at all, but they used a non-disposable one, and the trouble is that they cannot disinfect that machine with heat, just with chemicals.
This may leave a risk that is really microscopic, I understand it is, but still. 16 weeks. Four months dead broke.
I duly reported the drop in income, and then reported the resumption back to the former level four months later.

So.

My doctor told me to get another colonoscopy. In early December I went and got one.
Again, it was a non-disposable endoscope.
I knew what that meant. (I double-checked the current plasma regs online. I figured I certainly could no longer afford the five dollars to ride mass transit out to the plasma center to talk to the on-site doctor so he could tell me the same thing!)

So.

At about the same time, contemplating grim realities, I checked the post office website and found out that there were actually two positions that I could do that I could reach by bus.
Holy crow, this is a way to break the job-hunting ice, and I could do it online, and with a post office job I could even get a pension if I could manage to do twenty years. I will jump on this. I filled out an application for both. I took the little exam and I passed. So now I’m on the pre-hire list.

But then. I suddenly realized that…
My teeth are a bit looser now.
And these are… um… public-facing positions. And if I got the job I’d almost certainly lose my current insurance. And they don’t immediately give you the real, secure postal jobs with the great insurance - that has to wait until someone retires, and then they move new hires into those positions in order by seniority. New, year-to-year hires don’t have nearly as good insurance and might not even have dental. And my teeth are going downhill and do not look great… again, public-facing positions…
Had I painted myself into a corner?

This was stressful. There are long wait times on dental appointments now!

I’d better make an appointment and hope everything could be done before any possible interview process started!

But I found that I had thrown out the most recent letter advising me that my OHP health insurance was continuing. And - the exact provider for the dental part of that coverage has switched a few times. Was it still the same provider I had on my most recent OHP card?
I didn’t dare call and make an appointment with the wrong dentist.

So - now I had two things to go to the public assistance people about - the current provider of my dental coverage, and the temporary change to zero of my earned income.

So I couldn’t find the answer to the first question online. So then I walked up to the brand new office near me, only to find a paper notice on the door saying that they weren’t open after all and the place I should go was a bus ride away. I didn’t jump on the bus right then; I just went home. The next day I got on the phone and found out the information I needed.
I could then call the dental group and make my appointment. That’s when they told me the branch I’d gone to last time had closed.

… That was in early-to-mid-December.

… I did not realize until late January that the second reason I had needed to go had just vanished out of my head. Poof. The mandatory matter of Reporting Changes In Income.

You are supposed to report any change in income within ten days.
And by then it was close to midway through the gap.

I immediately took the bus to the office, carrying a copy of a piece of colonoscopy paperwork to establish the start date of the interruption.
When I got there a woman behind the desk called to me to ask what I needed. I briefly explained things. She said, “Well, you can use the drop-off box right there.”
So, okay. I had a pen with me, so I wrote my name and social security on the colonoscopy report along with an extended note making everything clear and left the report in the drop-off box.

I think that might have been a mistake. I should have talked to the desk people. But the desk person had waved me off.

Because then, this last month of February, the food stamps “periodic report” form came, where I should report any changes - and the adjustment of my income hadn’t been included. My given income was unchanged. What if they’d simply blinked at the piece of paper and then binned it?

So I hemmed and hawed - how do I plug this situation into this form? there’s nowhere for comments - and the easy online form would have been impossible… So I did my best with the paper form and typed up and printed an addendum with an explanation and also included a piece of colonoscopy paperwork for the date. And I took the bus to the office again.

This time I waited to speak to someone. The woman I gave the forms to stamped them and said they would be in touch by mail.

I don’t know what that means.

Now, Alex says hastily, feeling a fresh bloom of perspiration, what happened here was that I screwed up reporting a drop in income. If I had neglected to report a rise in income, that would have been serious; I might have then received more food stamps than I was entitled to. That’s bad. But screwing up reporting a drop… if that had any effect at all it would (I think) have been that I missed out on slightly more benefits I would have been entitled to. So this screwup can’t be construed as me handling something scurrilously for my own benefit, right?

Right?

But the requirement is that you report any change in income within ten days.

And this is a government bureaucracy.

I’m low-key terrified.
Not just if I lose my food stamps or something, although that would be something. I’d cope. Not just if I got a bad file with the government in some way, which… ugh.

But, damn it, my head. My terrible terrifying head. What it does. This is a consideration I’ve had very consciously in mind for years, as a priority one thing to do, a thing I always do… and it just went

pop

Last updated March 02, 2024