Assisted Procrastination

I'm getting a bad feeling about this.

Around 9:30 this morning, the nice lady from Social Security called to say that they would be very busy this afternoon. She asked if we could move our 2:00 appointment up to 11:00 (no -- if we left right now, we'd be late), or do the SSDI application interview over the phone. She seemed very scattered, but hey, I've had mornings like that. We'd prefer to do the interview in person, so we rescheduled for next Thursday afternoon.

A while later she calls back. They don't make appointments on Thursday afternoon. Somebody made a mistake. (Uh... that was you?) They don't have a Thursday afternoon appointment open for another week. (Wait... I thought you said...) OK. Have they got anything sooner, if we come earlier in the day? She said she thought we prefer afternoon. Right. She said she thought we prefer to come into the office. Right. Kept coming back to this, without ever quite managing to get it together. Scarecrow said it was like trying to talk to a hamster on a running wheel. She finally said she'd have to call us back.

So, after all this, we have an appointment next Thursday afternoon. Go figure. And the person we spoke to on the phone is not the person with whom we will file our claim. Which I think will be a very good thing.

I intended to finish filling out the paperwork for this visit last night. Looking it over, I decided I could finish it up this morning. Fortunately, the Social Security lady called before I got started. I guess I can put it off for another week.

The reason that I want to do the application interview in person is that an old friend, a fellow Gordon setter person, has had a day job with Social Security for 30-odd years. The one piece of advice she offered when I told her I would be applying for SSDI was that I should apply in person. She said that when she and her husband were conducting these interviews, a face-to-face interview gave them a better sense of a person's disabilities than they could get over the phone. Since I sound pretty normal over the phone (at least, as normal as I ever did) but look totally trashed in person, that sounded like a plan to me. I have never much liked talking on the phone, anyway. She also said the online application, aside from not setting you with a real person you can contact about your application, is really not quite ready for prime time. I don't know what she meant by that, exactly, but since I wasn't going to apply online, I didn't pursue it. So, anyway. For whatever that's worth.

With all that put off for another week, our project for the holiday (US Labor Day) weekend is figuring out how the demented whippet is getting out of the yard. The fence that secured assorted greyhounds for three years is one that he has been over, and under, and through, apparently at will. It's not a disaster when he escapes. He just runs around to the front door and waits to be let in, but still. Why does a smaller dog need a taller fence? This place is starting to look like Jurassic Park.