From my book, Hartwell Road (Centre County, PA late 70s): It seemed ideal, almost too good to be true. I blundered into the place when it was on a roll. The supervisory units had evolved into teams of compatible people and were given a great deal of independence, essentially limited only by the Department of Public Welfare’s procedure manual. I had never experienced such camaraderie in a job before. The problem was it was just a roll. Like compulsive gamblers, we rode the winning streak we had neither earned nor crafted as if it would last forever, even if we did nothing to earn or craft its continuation. The bizarre mixture of drudgery and tragedy that was the nature of welfare eligibility work did not tend to foster insight. The work flowed across one’s desk in a never-ending stream. Nothing was ever finished. It could be satisfying to help some stranger navigate through a period of misfortune with a minimum of pain and degradation, but when you were done with that person there was another waiting in line, and behind them the hopeless rabble who had been staggering through the appalling dysfunctions of welfare subculture for generations. It was easy to ache for the children and the sick, but my ache had no more meaning than their suffering: none, perhaps less than none. Like poverty, prolonged, stress-ridden drudgery atrophies one’s sense of delayed gratification. When you have fifteen minutes left in your lunch hour, you have another beer and when the good-looking female coworker you have nothing in common with wants to give you a blow job at the office picnic, you do it. It was insane and for a while, I loved it. It’s impossible to say exactly when our flush of positive energy began to self-destruct. Probably much sooner than any of us realized. The collective ache of our burned-out cynicism was always boiling just beneath the surface, needing only a tiny crack in the facade to erupt. The big cracks, the major fault lines, stand out in memory: a caseworker’s suicide, a lunch-hour, barroom fistfight, the softball game with another agency that turned into a drunken brawl when Mick bit the umpire, the Alice B. Toklas brownies eaten by the wrong people at the Christmas party, the angry lecture from a normally soft-spoken director when a third of the caseworkers showed up for staff meeting twenty minutes late and drunk. The teams degenerated into cliques. A series of hiring freezes drove caseloads to impossible levels. I joked in a staff meeting once that when caseloads reached a certain point it should actually be thought of as a work reduction because nobody needed to feel responsible for anything anymore. No one even smiled. It was no joke to them.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 23:12:00 +0000
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