I’ve known several disability scammers in my life. They went to a doctor with a sob stary and list of symptoms from the internet, got a depression diagnosis, and proceeded to live in poverty for the next several years. I’d say the rest of their lives, but I stopped hanging around the most noteworthy losers over twenty years ago and my life only got better for it.
So here’s the thing. I get how they go on disability. Minnesota is apparently infamous for having doctors that will do it at the drop of a hat. Hell, I had a doctor offer to do the same thing for me back in the early 2000s but I declined because my depression doesn’t approach actual disability levels.
What I don’t get is how they live on their fake disability. The three most noteworthy were proud to have worked all of a few years each by their late ‘20s and early ‘30s, and none of them had ever made more than eight or nine bucks an hour doing bottom-rung temp jobs. I know this because they’d complain about it all the time, and swear the temp agency I’d been working for at the time “doesn’t have any jobs over eight bucks an hour,” despite the fact that I was making nine and got a raise to ten when I was hired on full time at the foundry. Which wasn’t terrible money for an unskilled kid to be making in the late ‘90s.
In fact, when the first one found out how much I was making at the foundry – the princely sum of nine dollars an hour as a temp – he was actively angry that they were paying me “so much” for getting off my butt and working for a living.
They’d also complain about their disability checks. Disability was paying them maybe a few hundred bucks a month. Even with other forms of public assistance (rental and energy assistance, food stamps, etc.) they were barely scraping by. Which is where I came in. I needed a place to stay and didn’t know any better, so I stayed with one couple as a roommate for a few months until I made it clear I wasn’t going to bankroll the guy’s hobbies and pay rent on top of it, and rented a room from the other couple before I jumped ship to stay with my now-former roommate Anthany. Better deal, nicer place, and dude actually believed in working for a living; we worked together at the foundry.
In both cases, my rent was about as much as their entire disability check. Maybe a week’s pay for me at the time. My disability checks should be 60% of my usual pay. Luckily I do OK so it isn’t like I’ll be looking at not being able to cover the bills, but that’s the big distinction. My disability checks are survivable because I have a decent job. And that’s the thing – they’re survivable and not much more. It isn’t like I’m going to be banking fat stacks and living the high life.
How in tarnation does someone get by on less than a quarter of what I’m supposed to get? Oh, right. They didn’t. They “got by” through a combination of setting the bar so low they were one step above homeless and mooching off anyone dumb enough to come within arm’s reach.
Forget going out and doing something useful. If I suggested they get jobs the response was either piously claiming they’re too disabled to work, snorting at the insanity of expecting them to earn an honest living, or whining that the only jobs they were qualified for didn’t pay some ridiculously high wage they felt they deserved.
As I mentioned earlier today, I’m on disability myself for the next month or so. It’s been two weeks and I’m already sick of it.
The first week I mostly spent in bed. My foot needed to be elevated as much as possible to help it heal, and we didn’t have a suitable workstation set up for me; I have a nice setup down in the basement, but I can’t spend a lot of time down there with the wound-vac and other issues. Most notably, climbing back up the stairs is just difficult enough that I’m not sure I’d make it to the bathroom in time if I waited too long.
I’ve spent this last week (and likely the next few) sitting in a recliner in the living room with my laptop. I write, I work on assets for Devil Monkey Games, I work on the Rock Solid Mamas website (now e-commerce enabled!), and I play a lot of World of Warcraft.
While I’m doing all of this screwing around, I get to watch as Stacie and Mama do pretty much everything around the house and yard. Neither of them will let me do anything more strenuous than cook, and even that’s kind of a hard sell. Half the time if I get up to refill my drink one of them tries to stop me so I don’t aggravate my foot.
And all I can do is sit there, completely gorram useless. Watching.
I get it. I’m legitimately injured and have to heal up. There’s a strip of meat 1.4cm wide and 4.5cm long cut off the bottom and side of my food, and I need to stay off it as much as possible while the meat grows back. As I sit here, I’m getting shooting pains from it that the Vicodin barely takes the edge off of. I also have a wound-vac attached to it to speed up the process. Between the two, there is no way I can work in a machine shop right now or even drive myself there. I have a team of doctors saying this, and pictures nobody wants to see to demonstrate how serious it is. Cutting off a toe or two, and maybe the whole foot was on the table while I was in the hostibule if the antibiotics and cutting away dead and infected meat hadn’t worked. This was and still is a serious gorram medical issue here.
And I still feel completely useless sitting here screwing around while everyone else is being productive. Which is even more screwed up when you realize I’m making assets for Devil Monkey Games and doing upgrades for our websites. So I’m actually being more or less productive and not just screwing around all day. Now I just have to figure out how to get paid for it.
It’s been two whole weeks and a few days. I likely have six more weeks of this. I’m already climbing the walls. Watching everyone else be productive while I screw around just annoys me to no end, even though I know damn well there’s a reason they demand I stay here in this chair all day.
Between that uselessness and the poverty-level income, I cannot comprehend how anyone would choose that. How lazy and utterly unambitious do you have to be to think “you know what? I’m going to collect less than minimum wage to be completely useless” is a Grand Master Plan For Success? The closest I can get to understanding it is the same way a normal person can say they understand a serial killer – there’s a pathology there and it makes some kind of sense in a completely defective way, but you still can’t actually understand it. As Jayne Cobb once said, “Eating people alive? Where’s that get fun?”
One of them justified it by characterizing his disability scam as theft from The Man. In his eyes, if you steal you’re winning because you aren’t being forced to work. Good job. You’ve defined “winning” as barely getting by with the minimum possible effort. I have no idea how the others justified it in their minds. But they certainly weren’t trying very hard to improve their situations.
Another of them kept bragging about how he used his initial lump sum payment to buy a computer and fancy-ish monitor. Which he used solely to pirate crappy video games and play them. Good job. You spent a year living with your mom doing absolutely nothing to get a few thousand dollars from the taxpayers so you could sit around playing video games all day and ignore your kid. Such ambition. Very successful.