A friend, a single mother, lost her job when the store she worked at closed. The ex is a dead beat, so unemployed with a child to feed, she applied for food stamps. At the initial interview, she asked what happened when she got a new job. How did she go about removing herself from the food stamp program. The interviewer looked at her like she was from another planet. Why on earth would she want to get off food stamps? Obviously he had never been asked that question before.
A friend of mine who had a knack for getting herself into hard situations once applied for assistance. She had two kids at the time, and had never NOT worked a day in her life (since she was 13 years old). She wanted to go to school to become a surgical tech, so she had to quit her job, and temporarily move to Arizona. She was denied assistance because she had a car. She got it all worked out in the end, had her ex take care of the kids for a year back home, and got herself a part time at the school. Luckily, we had a friend living in the area that could help her. She graduated a year later, and was immediately hired at a local hospital, and is now doing quite well for herself.
But she is still dumbfounded, at the time, she had a legit need for temporary assistance, that would be temporary, as she was working toward a goal, but the powers that be denied her because she had a car, with the theory I suppose that if she can afford a car (a beater that was paid for), she didn’t need assistance.