Chapter 2 

The SSA office on Odana Road was pretty if you could divorce it from the towering snowdrifts which surrounded it. It was a new building with a lot of glass and toasted-almond facing, with a large parking lot in back. It had just been built a year previously, replacing a ratty storefront down by the University of Wisconsin between a bagel shop and a porno bookstore. I drove by the new building a few times on Sunday to be sure I could find it when it counted, and wheeled into the parking lot at precisely 8 AM Monday morning. I slid my way to a door marked "Employees Only and stepped inside.

I found myself in a storeroom, stacked floor to ceiling with metal shelves full of forms, all carefully marked with Dymotape labels -- "SSA-1," SSA-18b," SSA-37." The snow clinging to my shoes made wet footprints in the indoor-outdoor carpeting. The whole place smelled like a new building -- synthetic fabric and wood veneer.

A bustling noise led to a door. A pretty young woman with bangs gestured to me.

"You with the class?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Hi. I'm Doreen Haug. I'm going to be your secretary." She didn't seem too thrilled about it. "The classroom's this way."

The office was a huge bull-pen affair, with clusters of desks scattered around in odd patterns. Everything was brand-new and obviously from the same Government catalog as the furniture in my old office in Washington. Oddly, it gave me a reassuring feeling, a little touch of continuity in a new world. A seven-foot high row of orange partitions hid the front of the building from view. Along the back wall where I had come in were a group of three or four glass-walled conference rooms. Doreen led me to one.

"This is where the class will be held." She lightened her bored manner slightly. "Can I get you a coffee or something?"

"No, no thanks." I was strictly a Diet Rite man, but I didn't feel right asking for one at eight in the morning. I could see the break room off to one side, and a Diet Rite button on a soft-drink machine. Thank God.

Eight long tables had been arranged in an elongated horseshoe pattern in the classroom, with low bookcases along the walls. They were filled with standard GSA binders. The few classmates who arrived ahead of me nodded in vague recollection of the night before. I picked a chair against the wall, from which I could see the door and the rest of the office, and to kill time glanced through the contents of my soft-sided briefcase.

There was a Xeroxed letter from the head of the Madison office, welcoming me and providing directions to the motel and the office. There was my Standard Form 50, a smudged carbon of the usual Government reassignment form, which described me as transferring from a GS-301-5, Editorial Assistant, at the Naval Supply Systems Command in Washington DC to a GS-1083-5, Claims Representative, with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Social Security Administration, Region Five, Chicago, with place of employment the district office at Madison, Wisconsin. My new salary (the same as my old salary) was $9,959 a year. There was a gas station map of Madison, its interesting topography making a pretty picture in blue and white.

By the time I glanced up, the room was full of the 15 trainees. A low, uninformative murmur went on between us as we awaited our teacher. We were certainly all expecting some grey bureaucrat who would have us all asleep by 9 AM.

Instead, a tall, young man with hair below his shoulders bounded to the front of the horseshoe. He wore new jeans and a white oxford-cloth shirt. He looked a little spaced.

"Hi gang!" He smiled and we smiled back. Who is this clown?

"I'm Jeff Wallace, office manager here. I'll be in charge of you guys for the next three months." He glanced around expectantly. "We're having some fun now, huh?"

Even standing still, Jeff glowed with repressed energy. He sat up on the edge of one of the tables and idly twitched one foot back and forth.

"I'm supposed to say this next part." He struggled to straighten his face and cleared his throat. "I'd like to welcome you to the Social Security Administration. In the next three months, we will try to teach you the basics of claim taking and case adjudication. We'll get to the class schedule later, and introduce you to your two instructors. But right now, I'm going to get our administrative assistant and see if we can get some of your paperwork out of the way."

I scanned the office outside. It had mostly filled up by now with a fairly normal- looking group of people. They didn't appear to be as preoccupied as the federal workers back in DC. Doreen was hunched over her typewriter working on something, but most everyone else was in chatty little groups, occasionally glancing curiously in our direction.

The next few hours were taken up by endless paperwork -- employment forms, emergency cards, W-4s, health insurance declarations and a lot of other things no one, including our grandmotherly administrative assistant, could figure out. At 9 AM, the workers outside settled down and occasionally disappeared behind the giant orange partition to deal with the public. A high moment was when we were given our per diem checks -- $1,395, and all for me! My head swam.

It was almost 11 AM before Jeff silenced our growing mutterings of disbelief at our paperwork burden.

"I almost forgot! You guys haven't been sworn in yet!"

Yes, even lowly GS-5s have to take an oath of office; an oath, I later found out, that is the same given to the Vice-President and Cabinet officers.

Jeff came back with a tape recorder and . . . a guy dressed like Billy Carter. There was no mistaking the overalls, the Jack Daniels cap, the brilliant teeth and the squinty eyes. This guy was a pro.

"We have the honor of having an important Government person here to administer the oath of office to you today. I'm sure he needs no introduction." Jeff pushed a button on the tape recorder and stepped back.

A tinny high school band version of "Stars and Stripes Forever" wafted across the room. The Billy lookalike raised his hands in a benedictory gesture.

"All rise, raise your right hand," he drawled in the overvowelled Georgia dialect, "and repeat after me."

We slowly stood up, suspecting a trick, and glanced furtively at each other. What the hell is this? Numbly, we raised

our right hands.

"Ah, state yuh naime . . . " "I, mumble mumble mumble . . ."

"Promise to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. . . "

The tinny music rattled on. Somehow, I hadn't pictured it like this.

After lunch, which consisted of machine food from the break room, we all gathered together and braved the noonday cold to take a look at Westwood Village, an apartment complex on Schroeder Road which had set aside some apartments for us. The manager, an oddly-shaped retiree, met with us in his office-cum-model apartment.

"We got studios and we got one-bedrooms. All furnished. Studios are $165 and the one-bedrooms are $205. Take your pick."

We filled out our application cards. Wanting to revel as much as possible in my new freedom, I decided on a one-bedroom, while most everyone else settled for the studios; all except Cindy T., who had decided, for some demented reason, to remain at the Highland Inn for the whole three months. We paid our security deposits and headed back to the office.

My own apartment! The very idea made the back of my neck tingle. In college the best accommodations I had had was the front bedroom of a duplex off-campus -- big, light, but hardly private. Living at home with my parents was of course nice, but I was too old for it and found myself resenting their constant presence. A place of my own . . . I couldn't decide what to do with it first.

The afternoon was devoted to general office principles. The people in the office who took the claims were called "claims representatives," or "CRs." There were another class of people who dealt with claimants who were already receiving benefits called service representatives, or SRs. The secretaries like Doreen were called not secretaries, but "claims development clerks," or CDCs. A CDC served two CRs, except for Doreen who would have a real CR named Renee Bannier and the 15 of us to worry about. Renee and Doreen were "Title II," which meant they dealt with the meat and potatoes of the Social Security world -- retirees, survivors and disabled people. Another section of CRs, SRs and CDCs were assigned to "Title XVI" work, handling the Supplemental Security Income program. SSI was started in 1973 as a sort of federal welfare program (although SSA hated to refer to it as such), covering people who aren't covered by Social Security or any other kind of state or local program -- the last layer of the safety net, so to speak. There were also data review technicians (DRTs) who input all the data we gathered into the megalithic SSA computer in Baltimore, the office managers (Jeff for Title II and a woman with the improbable name of Bette Davies for Title XVI) and a few oddball positions here and there. In all, maybe 50 people. We broke at 4:30 and retired to our rooms at the Highland Inn.


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