Middlesex County Board of Social Services

This place is the worst. The absolute worst. I can only thank them for reluctantly helping me get on foodstamps, and TRA [temporary rental assistance] recently. But aside from dealing with them in person, which is an all-​day nightmare, sending and receiving documents from them is another nightmare. They will misspell your name, your landlords name, forget to file appointments made which result in benefits being cancelled, and when you fight to get them to admit their mistakes, they brush you off with no apology. After all, we’re all expendable. They get paid whether they help us or not.
My benefits have been accidentally cancelled 3 times in the 4 years I have dealt with them. I constantly need to re-​certify every 2 or 3 months for housing. I have to get 2 medical deferrals; one for cash assistance and the other for housing. Huh? Constantly they need these forms, even if you gave them one the month prior. If they don’t forget to «file» these documents, they take at least 3 weeks to process.
This organization is full of the worst, most self-​entitled yuppies and paperweights I’ve ever had the misfortune of dealing with.

For a place that’s giving out free healthcare, you would think the people here would be a little more… healthy-​looking. Instead, pretty much everyone you see once you enter looks like they have some kind of debilitating, communicable disease — and frankly, that disease is poverty. You hope that these people get medical attention when you see them — if not for them, then at least for their multiple, poorly-​behaved children.
Waiting in line to submit paperwork here was uncomfortable to say the least. This guy with facial tattoos and missing front teeth kept on asking to «borrow» my phone to make a call «right quick,» but I suspect that he was just trying to steal my phone and pawn it so that he could buy some combination of fast food /​drugs with the money. There were also kids running around everywhere and shrieking. While I was standing on line, a sickly-​looking youngster used me as an object to hide behind so that his borderline abusive older brother didn’t find him and use him as a testing dummy for pro wrestling moves. Awkward.
But the people here need these government services, right? I can’t give this place one star based on the needy customers, right? Right. This place gets one star for being an unproductive, unwieldy bureaucratic monolith in which time stands still; the workers here are like compassionless sloths who periodically leave their booths to go on uncharacteristically long «lunch breaks» and other breaks indefinitely. In an economy this bad, can they really not find better workers than these? You could probably hold interviews right out there in the waiting room.