Get yourself some government cheese!

Go buy some nice brie from Zupan's with the help of Uncle Sam!

Free cheese is not in the government stimulus package, so don't check your mailbox. But if you are in the real tough spot, not unlike myself, you may qualify for some help. Getting assistance from the government doesn't take much, it's pretty easy. What comes a little harder is getting yourself to actually ask for the help.

As a kid I remember my parents using food stamps to buy milk and eggs at the store, but never thought much about it since. Then my cash flow pretty much stopped, not that it was the Nile of cash flow or anything but it was better than what I currently have trickling through. Even so, it took me a month to fill out the 5 pages of the 16 page application you need to complete in order to apply for food stamps. What was even harder, heading into the DHS office for my application interview.

From the years of working in corporate America I have been classically conditioned to dress up a bit when meeting anyone. So like Pavlov's faithful dog, I too obediently queued up and waited... What I didn't realize is no one cares when you are applying for food stamps!

As I walked into the front door of the DHS office it was pure chaos. People were everywhere, decked out in Goodwill's finest with no logical order at all. Bodies were filling space in a little front office, filling out paper work and staring at the front desk where no one sat. After a few minutes, I realized there were two sets of people there. One group was simply waiting to use the free phone, the other group was frantically filling out paperwork for the various services offered by the office. My guess is most folks don't do much preparation prior to stopping by the here.

I finally caught the attention of someone walking through the sea of cubicles behind the front desk and announced my appointment. It took a second for the person to fully comprehend that I was actually speaking to him. Once we were able to establish the fact that a conversation was indeed happening, I was told that if I continued waiting in the unorganized mess, someone would find me.

This didn't instill a large amount of confidence in me.

Eventually I was called forth behind the crowded desk into the vast sea of cubicles. At first, it seemed just as I expected, but as we wound farther and farther through the rows, embedding ourselves deeper and deeper into cubicle-land, I noticed something was a little....strange. Making the turn into the last bank of cubes, it finally clicked. I could only compare it to things I had seen previously in television sitcoms.

Trolls....Trolls as far as the eyes can see!

You remember those little plastic trolls with the crazy hair that every bingo playing grandma has right next to her ink doter? Within seconds I was surrounded! Trolls on the ledge of every cubical I pasted. This again did not instill much confidence in me at all.

Fortunately for me the cube we finally arrived at was free of the crazy hair vermin.

After my adventure through cubical-land things started to become a little more normal and I left the office with my new Oregon Trail Card.

To qualify for food assistance you really have to be broke. Make sure you know your finances and have all your paperwork filled out before venturing into the office...it's not that hard you just have to take the step and ask for help.