re: last several rts: the biggest difference between my life since I married into the middle class, and *especially* since I started working at U of M, and my life in my twenties is the extent to which my entire day doesn't get derailed by errands that I have to do to exist

three hours for the walk, intake, wait time, and procedure the first time you donate plasma. three hours the next time because they fuck up and forget to call your name when it's your appointment. three hours the next time because the machine is weird.

three hours the time after that because the machine is still weird, but this time they don't let you come back for a month because the machine took whole blood.

three hours reporting it when your wallet got stolen at gunpoint; an hour to walk to the bank to fill out the paperwork to get a new debit card; an hour two weeks later to walk to the bank to check your balance and pull out money and ask where the debit card is

another hour a couple weeks after that because they put you off before but, whaddya know, they did in fact fuck up your paperwork and your debit card, which was stolen from you, that you had to pay for a replacement of, is indeed late

three hours, easily, to replace your drivers license because that got stolen too

four hours to buy a desk (i.e. walk to the Salvation Army, find one that you can carry on your shoulders, buy, and walk back)

the year I got food stamps, each of those waits was easily three hours, and I felt like that was an abnormally well-run social service agency with unusually polite and considerate personnel

during a lot of my period of poverty, I worked at a homeless shelter, so I also got to see what the next rung underneath me on the latter looked like. the casual way we waste those people's time is just evil. two hours on the bus to sit for three hours and then be denied benefits

just pinch, pinch, pinch people to death. it's insane. one of the kindest things you can do as a middle class person is be a Bureaucracy Docent/hellraiser for someone else

another kind thing you can do is advocate for simple, big, default-to-yes social programs. (among the homeless ppl I worked with, it was a truism that your first application for disability got rejected almost as a test of yr seriousness.

you'd see visibly seriously disabled people who'd be like "yep. got rejected. gotta wait another month" and meanwhile they have to sleep on a mat