Today I tried to cancel my late son’s food share card. I called the customer service number on the card and after a number of electronic messages and a very long wait I finally got to talk to a human being. She said she could stop money from being put on the card for food, but to really cancel it I would need to call the local Milwaukee County office that establishes eligibility for food stamps. She gave me the number and I called.
After many electronic messages, being disconnected a few times and an extremely long wait I finally reached a human being. I told the person at the county office answering the phone what I wanted to do and he said he would connect me to the proper person.
By this time I had already invested about an hour of time waiting to perform this simple task so I decided to wait. During my waiting, as I did the previous hour, I put the call on speaker phone while I did my regular chores, washing clothes, checking my email, preparing some food for dinner and such. This time a message kept coming up saying my phone call would be answered in the order it was received. About every 20 or 30 minutes the speaker phone element would stop working and I would switch to another phone so I could continue my work while waiting. After the 3rd time the speaker phone went dead and after two hours of total waiting to cancel the food card I gave up and hung up.
I have noted before how poor people’s lives are full of such waiting. People wait for food stamps, wait for jobs, wait for medical attention and on and on until they get some help or give up. However, this time I realized the excessive waiting, especially at the county level, was due to job cuts in the system. The present county executive in Milwaukee who is now running for Governor of Wisconsin has made deep cuts in the public transit system, the social welfare system, the Behavior Health system, the public park system and many other services, especially those that serve persons in need.
However, it is not only him cutting services so taxes for the rich can be cut. It is true on all levels except for military spending. Wasteful Military Spending of trillions of dollars dominates our tax revenues while jobs are lost and services to humans are being cut.
If the politicians were really looking to create jobs they would hire more customer service representatives and cut back on the waiting. There are jobs for the waiting.
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