Countdown to Homelessness Day 11

The IQ of a House Plant

I’ve just spent 8 hours on the internet looking for places to live, looking for help with rent, looking, looking, looking—and I’m burnt out for the night.

There is plenty of material on rental help, grants, programs—if you're a non-profit program. They write words and words and even more words to each other. They market to each another; theorize together, organize and throw fund-raisers together. It’s a very full dialogue.

That's all very nice but... we're getting ready to sleep in our car. I just need to focus on getting help for me and my son...I can't figure out who does what and if they can help. There isn't a central place that coordinates what's really available...or maybe there is...maybe they're hiding it from me... When I talk to one person, I hear one thing. Then I talk to another and he tells me something else... I find lots of things, get excited and then read, We do not make grants directly to individuals...but they sure give each other a lot of money...

Last year, I searched and found one website that looked very informative. They would send me all the material for free! –plus $1.48 shipping. Well, that seemed reasonable, so I typed in my Visa Card number, authorized the $1.48 and clicked please send. I never received a single piece of paper from them. But the next month, I noticed that my bank balance was low. Scanning through my account activity was Greek to me because the bank puts it all in these top secret codes and numbers, which tend to cause my eyes to cross.

I sighed and told myself to be more careful next time, never connecting my bank balance with the grant company.

That month, they took out $30 and some cents. The next month, I was short again, but by then, I’d forgotten about grants. I was fighting to keep my house, talking to foreclosure experts or filing complaints with the attorney general, who’d won the class action against my beloved predatory lender. I was trying to puzzle out the ramifications of her notice that declared we had won. I was entitled to a whopping $400 for losing my house... Did they forget a couple of zeros??...I did the math...(it wasn't hard...) and yep, they were a tad short... So, I returned the form and advised them where they could invest my portion of the settlement...

Point is—I was distracted. For someone like me with pretty severe ADHD, that is my normal state. So, another month went by and another $30 was nicked.

The next month, my attorney instructed me to file bankruptcy. Now. If you’ve ever filed bankruptcy, you know what I'm going to say. It's really hard. Not because you have to hunt down all the names, addresses, amounts, verify them, sort them out from collection agencies... yada...yada...yada...

It's because it's a slow crawl on your belly down memory lane—past all the broken shards of failed relationships—over the sharp edges of old injustices—through the muck of self-recriminations—and down into potholes of suicidal depression.

When the bank statement came that month, it was the last thing I wanted to look at.

And so it went, they nipped away at my heels to the tune of $180 before my banker pointed this out to me. I was in his cubical that day, profusely apologizing for bouncing a check—hoping that my remorse would guilt him into removing all those $31 overdraft charges on $10 ATM withdraws. He was nice enough to cross off a couple of the charges, but it hardly made a dent in the total I’d racked up.

$180 may not sound like a lot of money to some people. At one time, it had not been much money to me either. But I was living by the chin of my chinny-chin-chin and couldn’t afford to shave so closely. I’d had that same checking account for the past 30 years, through three corporate takeovers and several hundred thousand dollars of deposits and withdraws. But that had been a long time and several personnel changes ago. I’d sometimes fantasize that they had a graph of my net worth for the last 10 years in my file—with a big red circle with a line through it—BAAAAAD customer....BAD, BAD, BAAAAD... I suppose that says more about my shame than anything.

The 800 number had been listed next to the withdraw all along, he pointed out, and suggested I call it.

Well, I did call, and got an out-sourced Indian accent who told me that, had I scrolled to the bottom of the ‘agreement’ (it was two pages of small print...) it stated that I had agreed to be robbed—because I did NOT cancel this agreement within 30 days...

Argh.....I didn’t know who to be madder at—him or me. In the end, I had given these jackals $180 and the bank jackals $400+! —All because I was a complete idiot. Well, so much for paying the electric bill this month...I thought...

And so, thirty years of a banking relationship was ended when they closed my account...

I’m a grown woman. I can comprehend basic physics; I can understand very large words; I can even play intermediate level in backgammon.

But give me a paper full of numbers or a page of small print and my IQ drops to the level of a house plant...

Next—
I’m in Denial...

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