I visited a client today who didn’t have a single chair in the house. A big flat screen TV and a nice car in the driveway, but nowhere to sit.
?
No table either, but then that would require at least one chair, I guess.
The #1 Social Worker rule when making home visits is never to sit on any soft surface.
You can use your imagination to sort out the why.
The #2 Social Worker rule is to have an exit in view at all times.
Laugh all you like, but this was about the extent of my training on *how to conduct home visits* without bringing home bed bugs or getting kidnapped by a psychopath.
These rules usually find me doing business in the client’s kitchen. Today’s kitchen had a couple bicycles, a washer/dryer combo, and the most fabulously neat collection of shoes I’ve seen yet. In the kitchen that had no table or chairs.
I wanted to ask, but it felt really rude… where do you sit to eat? Where do you sit to put on any of those fabulously neat shoes?
There was no couch, either.
Weird.
Oh! I also visited this lady… remember the one who likes to call me over and over and leave the same exact message a dozen times, at three-minute intervals, on my voicemail? Very, very nice lady who lives in the most awful of neighborhoods. Very organized, too, apparently. Her kitchen didn’t have a table either, but the fridge was covered with post-it notes. As was part of the bathroom mirror and most of one wall in her bedroom. In big block letters on one of those post-its was my name and phone number. Next to it was my business card, labeled also in big block letters, “CASEWORKER”. Next to that she’d printed out my field and office schedule.
Weird.
Explains a lot though, probably.
Mind you, I’m not making fun exactly… just sort of pondering what to do with these glimpses into other people’s lives and homes.
