An Administrative Error
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it was probably too much to expect that I would finally find housing after all this time. I had seen apartments available in a property that appeared in the housing list published by the DC Department of Mental Health in an area that was very desirable. I wasted no time in contacting my case manager to make an appointment to see the apartments. Soon we made the visit to the property and saw the apartments. They definitely met with my approval. The next step was to go to the office of the property management to fill out the application form and to pay the application fee. My case manager and I made an appointment to go and do just that, and we made the trip out to Rockville for that purpose. So we made the trip, I filled out the form, paid the fee and – then something just had to go wrong, and it did.
The next step was that my case manager had to fax to the property management the confirmation of my DMH housing subsidy, which was a mandatory element in my securing the housing. It was at this point that it was discovered that the paperwork for my subsidy was missing from my personal file, even though I had filed new paperwork at the beginning of 2007 as the Department of Mental Health requires of all subsidy holders. Then there was the mystery: where did the paperwork go? Because of the missing paperwork, I lost the opportunity to obtain the housing for which I had made the efforts and paid the application fee. I don’t even begin to talk about the disappointment that I felt, which goes without saying.
Someone asked me the question, “Did you make copies of the paperwork that you filed?” The answer to that question would obviously be no, simply because I don’t have a copy machine at my disposal, which is the case for most people. Even if I had made copies, that would not have processed the paperwork for the subsidy, which is what was required, and I still have no idea if the paperwork had been processed or not. Because of an administrative error, I remain without housing; that is the long and short of the story.
It won’t help now to find someone to blame; the damage has already been done. I’ve lost my chance at that housing opportunity. Opportunities like that are very rare; I have seen precious few like it in the four years that I have been looking. I hardly need any words to attempt to explain the situation or to console me, as futile as they would be; I need suitable housing, as I have needed from the outset. If a bureaucratic snag has prevented me from getting it, I can’t be the one who has to manage all the facets of all the paper trail that has to take place in obtaining housing when there are other people who are paid salaries to do just that. Somewhere the channels have gotten clogged – am I supposed to be the one to troubleshoot and resolve the problem here? I should be receiving a salary if so!
If I weren’t already taking anti-depressants, I would need them now. Years of stagnation are continuing only because somewhere someone misplaced some papers that related to my case. I have every reason to feel more than a bit down about that.
The next step was that my case manager had to fax to the property management the confirmation of my DMH housing subsidy, which was a mandatory element in my securing the housing. It was at this point that it was discovered that the paperwork for my subsidy was missing from my personal file, even though I had filed new paperwork at the beginning of 2007 as the Department of Mental Health requires of all subsidy holders. Then there was the mystery: where did the paperwork go? Because of the missing paperwork, I lost the opportunity to obtain the housing for which I had made the efforts and paid the application fee. I don’t even begin to talk about the disappointment that I felt, which goes without saying.
Someone asked me the question, “Did you make copies of the paperwork that you filed?” The answer to that question would obviously be no, simply because I don’t have a copy machine at my disposal, which is the case for most people. Even if I had made copies, that would not have processed the paperwork for the subsidy, which is what was required, and I still have no idea if the paperwork had been processed or not. Because of an administrative error, I remain without housing; that is the long and short of the story.
It won’t help now to find someone to blame; the damage has already been done. I’ve lost my chance at that housing opportunity. Opportunities like that are very rare; I have seen precious few like it in the four years that I have been looking. I hardly need any words to attempt to explain the situation or to console me, as futile as they would be; I need suitable housing, as I have needed from the outset. If a bureaucratic snag has prevented me from getting it, I can’t be the one who has to manage all the facets of all the paper trail that has to take place in obtaining housing when there are other people who are paid salaries to do just that. Somewhere the channels have gotten clogged – am I supposed to be the one to troubleshoot and resolve the problem here? I should be receiving a salary if so!
If I weren’t already taking anti-depressants, I would need them now. Years of stagnation are continuing only because somewhere someone misplaced some papers that related to my case. I have every reason to feel more than a bit down about that.
posted by MasterWriter at 12:44 p.m.
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