A day (literally) at DCFS

Having officially graduated from my training yesterday, I started full-time today at DCFS. To update from my last post, I am technically in my first choice office, but they don't have enough space there, so 3 of us got transferred to the satellite location which is 3X the distance from my house. I was really ticked off when I first found out, and am still annoyed but mainly over it. Before starting today, we had 3 field days. During these days, we mainly sat around all day and did nothing. Maybe we got to shadow on a visit, but they were usually 5 minutes tops. (Which is really frustrating when you've just driven an hour to get there... yes that's how far away our office is from our service area). Today, I came in not knowing what my assignment was, who my supervisor is, or if I would even have a desk.

After a day at work, here is my update:

• I do have a desk. However, the people were told today that they would have to vacate their desks, and as you might imagine, they weren't happy about it.
• I am going to be a "back-end" worker, also known as FM&R (Family Maintenance and Reunification), aka generic worker. This means that I will be working with children and families who are already in the system. This is a relief, because I didn't really want to be doing child abuse assessments in Watts, because they take a while and you can be there until late detaining children in really dangerous neighborhoods. "Hello, Mr. Grape Street Crip, I'm here to take away your child, how do you feel about that?" Yeah, not so much. So, I'm happy.
  
• My supervisor seems really cool.
  
• My supervisor's boss seems crazy. She was totally condescending and was reprimanding him in front of us. And making it clear that he needed to lie about something to make her look good. If you're going to ask someone to do that, at least be kind.
• On a positive note, my good friend from the program is not only at the same office as me, but she is also in the same unit, with the same supervisor. And our cubicles are across from each other. So we can throw paper airplanes at each other.
  

We got to shadow a new worker as she tried to figure out an explosion in her case, and then we totally eavesdropped on a conversation they were all having with the youth. It was interesting, and we were totally thinking to ourselves (oooh, that was a good question...... oh, that was rude....) hahaha. So, I'm feeling a lot more positive about things today. I came in not expecting to get anything out of today, and I came out knowing a lot more about what I would be doing. I am sure as I continue my job, more crazy stuff will come up to talk about!