Have you ever opened an app and said to yourself, “That can’t be right?!” 

That’s what happened to me.

Sunday started out a day like any other day recently.

Depressing.

Maybe a bit more depressing than usual because of what that Convicted Felon (TCF) had done the other day by ambushing Zelenskyy and thus making this country even more isolated on the world stage. I felt even less like reading the news headlines than I normally have lately.

Still I went through the motions of my quotidian routine and by late in the morning I decided to reconcile my credit card balance in my finance software with the latest statement that I had downloaded. Then, as it was the beginning of the month, I went to check on my bank’s checking account balance, just to make sure that all the automatic deposits and payments had taken place.

So I called up the bank account on my phone, and what I saw led to me to say to myself, “That can’t be right?!” 

Regular readers of this blog may recall that a few days ago I mentioned that I had received a notice from the Social Security Administration that I’d be receiving a lump sum payment retroactive for 2024 to make up for what they screwed me out of previously because I also received a monthly pension.

The email said they’d be processing the payments in stages, and I figured that meant alphabetical order and therefore I wouldn’t get my lumps until sometime later this year. I also figured that what they had screwed me out of didn’t amount to too much, merely coming to something in the low two figures per month, so the lump sum retroactive payment wouldn’t really be eyeopening.

Thus I wasn’t prepared to see a truly significant increase in my checking account balance caused by an unexpected deposit from the Social Security Administration.

Not only had they processed my lump sum retroactive payment much sooner than anticipated, but it was significantly larger than expected.

Not a life changing amount, but definitely noticeable in my bank balance.

The first thing I decided to do was to make a contribution to the ACLU. I try to keep my priorities straight.

I checked at the SSA website to see if they had a revised monthly statement for me, but it still reflected the old one.

Then I began to feel deflated once again. It didn’t seem fair that I was getting good news when all around me this country is going to shit.

And then I began to get angry. The Windfall Elimination Provision was basically a Republican/conservative law aimed squarely at government workers (it was enacted during the height of the anti-government Reagan administration in 1983), and for the past ten years it’s been screwing me out of a much more substantial piece of my earned retirement benefits than I had ever imagined.