Social Work

So, some of you know about my job, some of you don't. Let's talk about it.

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I work overnights as a social worker at building that helps house the formerly unhoused. The general rule is that the goal is to permanently house anyone without the capacity to live independently, and if they have a hope of living independently to work with them until they get to that place.

I work with drug addicts, veterans, lgbtq+ folks, people with disabilities (physical or mental), people who were released from prison after an extended stay, etc. Pretty much anyone that gets through the "vetting process". Which, for the record, does not do a good job. Sometimes there are dangerous individuals, like those suffering from psychoses of varying types, or the "just out of prison"-ers who may simply have a defensive/aggressive mindset.

As you may be thinking, boy do I have stories to tell. This blog will probably include those stories sometimes, and I'll do my best to include trigger warnings where I can. One unfortunate side effect of working in this industry is that my boundaries for difficult topics are much wider than some people, so I can sometimes be forgetful about the way these topics affect people, including me, which is why I'm in therapy.

It's interesting, and I think my job is awesome, honestly. I love what I do. But its simultaneously oppressive when I get around my wife's friends or coworkers, mostly people who work in corporate, emotionally sanitized environments. Just mentioning what I do elicits reactions that make it clear I work in an industry that constantly puts me in rooms full of people who literally could not do what I do, maybe even find me intimidating because I CAN do what I do. It's very isolating. Working nights makes it moreso.

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That said, I love working nights too. Minimal oversight, freedom to do what I like, a decent amount of downtime to work on the blog or just to decompress and watch TV. But when things get crazy, they get about as crazy as crazy gets.

Last night, to introduce a relatively tame story as our first introduction to what I do, we had a flood in the building. One of our tenants hot-wired his oven to use the electrical wiring to charge his electric bikes battery, then he went and got high at someone else's apartment. The oven caught on fire, setting off the sprinklers in that unit. The smoke detectors batteries had been removed, but the heat still caused the sprinklers to function correctly. When he returned to the unit, the water was about 6 inches deep, and had been held inside the unit by a seal on the front door to the unit. That is, until he opened the door.

Imagine a man, high on fentanyl, opening the door to his unit and being forcibly ejected by a flood of water spilling out into the hallway. I expect that someone will pull the camera feed so we can see the chaos for ourselves. Gallows humor perhaps, but that's how you function at a job like this.

The apartment in question was on the 4th floor, so several units on the 3rd floor were displaced, and our cafeteria and drug clinic were flooded as well. Maintenance was in the building until late, setting up fans, vacuuming water, and tearing down walls/ceilings to save what we could. My place in all this was more people oriented. I had to keep everyone calm, usher people into and out of the building, getting them to their units and explaining the situation, while still retaining the privacy and dignity of the person that ultimately caused the flood.

That means I couldn't say much more than that "someone left their stove on". You know, for HIPAA reasons. Now, telling someone suffering from severe psychosis that the building flooded and I can't really give them details as to why is not a simple thing. Reactions vary from extreme anger and aggression to mild frustration to "Time to go get drunk." If I did drink, I'd agree with that last one.

At one point the police arrived, to "investigate". That investigation consisted of them arriving, immediately tackling the tenant that caused the fire to the ground and arresting them for arson without any conversation or discussion. They were taken the police station, questioned, found innocent, and then left outside the police station without any guidance. I tend to be respectful towards police by and large, they deal with the same types of people that I do, and it can be very hard. But their actions last night are definitely of the "Fuck the Police" variety.

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Anyway, it went relatively smoothly all things considered. Then my coworkers all showed up late and I had to stay an extra hour or so. It's overtime, but not welcome after a night like that. Still, I'm off for a couple days now, and I have therapy tomorrow so I should be able to manage.

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No work was done on Goblins. :(