Those are pictures of posters that are in the lobby of the Somerville office of the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission.
"Ticket to Work" is a program which is supposed to help recipients of Social Security benefits to obtain and maintain employment. Since September of 2016, I have been trying to work with the Somerville MRC to obtain an appropriate work placement, which is why this page has the title that it does.
At the MRC orientation which I attended this past fall, the person who ran the orientation specifically said that the MRC works directly with several employers to place clients so that they can start working. One of the job opportunities that was mentioned was to be a dietary aide in a nursing home. I like old people, so I told the person who was assigned to be my case worker at the MRC that I'd be interested in that job.
The next group meeting that I attended at the Somerville MRC was called an Industry Briefing.
This is a picture of a list of employers with whom the MRC does job placement:
The person who ran the Industry Briefing described all of the employers, and I checked those for whom I was the most interested in working.
"Manpower" is a temporary employment agency. What the person who ran the meeting said was that one of the things that people have done through Manpower is to fold clothes in retail stores. Since the meeting happened during the holiday season, and since I have had many retail jobs in my life, I asked her if it were theoretically possible for me to start working the next week, and she said "Yes."
I was never told and never thought that I would not have to have an interview with a prospective employer; I knew that would be part of the process, a process which I realized, several weeks later, would not be available to me.
I thought that working for the temporary agency for the holidays would be a good way to prove that I was able to function normally in a working environment. I was entirely honest with everyone whom I spoke to at the MRC about my concerns that the hate blogs about me that are most of the first couple of pages of Internet search results for my name, and which almost all of the websites which publish them have refused to remove, would cause a lot of employers not to want to hire me. Since the permanent work placement that appealed to me the most was to be a dietary aide in a nursing home, and since I knew that even the blogs that I published documenting being stalked for years would be particularly concerning to prospective employers in working situations where there are vulnerable people, I thought, and said, that being a temporary employee for a few weeks was something that I'd like to do.
My case worker had already scheduled another meeting for me after the Industry Briefing, and what I realized over the subsequent weeks, and what was also demonstrated to me again today, was that what I wanted and all of my attempts to prove that I was employable were vehemently ignored.
The meeting after the Industry Briefing was with the director of another agency which works with clients who are at a much lower functional level than I am.
These are pictures of most the report that resulted from my having a second meeting with the director of the agency and then doing two separate work assessments that were supervised by people who work for that agency. The pictures don't include the names of anyone other than me:
Although I did talk to the director of this agency about what had happened at Bunker Hill Community College, she either didn't listen to what I said or she didn't understand it. I have no reason to think that the main instigator of harassment in the Chinese class that I took in the Spring semester of 2016 ever took copyrighted videos from my blogs and spliced them together to republish in a misleading way for his amusement. Although other people have done that, I have no reason to think that anyone at school ever did. There are so many inaccuracies in the paragraph about school that anyone who has read and listened to my blogs since last year will know how totally the person who wrote this report got the story wrong; for one thing, my Chinese teacher was female.
The report was written on December 14, 2016, and the MRC has subsequently refused to make any of the MRC's services and job placements available to me, saying that the MRC does not have the resources to provide me with the support that I need to be successfully employed, and that I will have to work with the agency whose director wrote that report to try to obtain employment, with the extremely degrading supervision and restrictions that the report recommends.
On December 19, 2016, I sent these pictures to the person who wrote that report, as part of an email that said "I AM FUNCTIONAL" and that also said that I would be a full-time student again at Bunker Hill in less than a month:
The tests are from the Spring 2016 semester. The apartment is my apartment. I also sent a picture of a paid bill that had my address, to prove that it's my apartment.
I also sent those pictures to the supervisor of the MRC case worker who had sent me to the other agency because she didn't want to have to represent me to employers as her client. Everyone is denying that's why she sent me to that agency, but I have interacted with the mental health care system since I was 17 and I know what happened.
My polite and appreciative behavior throughout the entire process, starting from the beginning in September 2016, did nothing. My immediate, unprompted admission and recognition of the difficulties of obtaining and maintaining employment because of my Internet presence did nothing. Sending thank-you notes at various stages of the process to the MRC and the other agency did nothing. Pictures of my grades and apartment did nothing.
This morning, I had a meeting with the person who wrote the report and the supervisor of the MRC case worker who had tried to have me removed from her caseload as soon as was humanly possible when she'd Googled my name after our first meeting. I was given the copy of the report. I read the first few pages and knew that the meeting was a waste of time. I tried to object to how I'd been characterized and was told by the person who wrote the report, "See, this is what happens when someone tries to talk to you, Lena," and at that I got up and left.
The person who wrote the report isn't stupid. She is not a bad person. She is not deliberately cruel. She is soft-spoken and has a pleasant demeanor and a sense of humor. However, because she works at an agency where she is a provider of services and I am a client, she thinks that what she says about me is the reality, and she thinks that if I disagree with her it is because I am too delusional to realize that she is right. Nothing that I said and no proof that I had sent her had dissuaded her from her assessment that, as her report says, "At this time, Ms. Kochman's goal of becoming either a Bio-Technician or a Lawyer, are unrealistic."
It is obvious from the report that the help that I know I need at work and what she and the MRC think that I need are diametric.
I don't know if she or anyone else at her agency or at the MRC had heard of me before I attempted to utilize the Ticket to Work program. Obviously, the federal and state governments had heard of me; the MRC is a government agency.
These are pictures that I took when I was leaving:
The Wet Floor signs were there on dry floor when I had gotten to the building for the meeting.
These are pictures that I took at the Assembly Square train station, which is on the other side of a few parking lots from the MRC:
What the conglomerate and everyone else who reads the report might not realize is that you don't have to have anything as dramatic as my Internet presence to have someone write a report like that about you; all you need is a label.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, January 4, 2017 @ 5:53 p.m.
