Social Security?

At the age of 34, I, thankfully, do not normally deal with the social security administration often. Recently, however, that has changed.

My father died in March, and I've been trying to help my mother navigate the many obstacles that come with the death of a spouse. Let me tell you, if you've never had to deal with it, be grateful. It is a maze that seems to have no end.

Social security has been one of those apparently never ending mazes. Today was just another in a long line of hoops that we have had to jump through.

They encourage people to use their website. That's not uncommon now a days and I've proficient in using most websites, so I did not foresee a problem.

A letter was sent about a month ago giving her a user name and temporary password to use. We went to the site listed, followed the instructions, and set up a new password for her. Easy, right? That's what I thought. However, today, was the first time we'd tried to go back into the system with the new password. First there was nowhere to actually 'log in'. You'd think that would be front and center, but after scanning the entire page, I couldn't find anywhere that said 'log in' or 'sign in'.

After about fifteen minutes of clicking on various things that looked promising, I was directed to a place to enter her user id and password. Wouldn't you know...it didn't work.

In the end, we decided to just call the local office and take care of the change by phone. So much for easy updates and changes via their website.