DC office of Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand

i called the senator’s nyc office and left a message on voice mail regarding my trying to sign up for a health care plan by the december 15^th deadline and not being able to. i called on december 11^th and let them know it was urgent because i would be having surgery on december 14^th, and therefore wouldn’t be able to keep trying to sign up the day before. no one from the senator’s office got back to me before the deadline. someone called me on december 16^th. when i told her that she was getting back to me after the deadline and that i left a very clear message regarding the timing of this matter, all she could tell me was that they received an enormous amount of phone calls and didn’t have enough staff to call back in time. if you don’t have enough staff to service your constituents, i would strongly suggest that you find a way to hire more people.
luckily, i was able to get through before the deadline and was able to sign on to a plan. in my opinion, there is no excuse for this sloppy follow up to an urgent matter. surely, i couldn’t have been the only one experiencing this problem. they need to figure out a way to do better for the people of ny.

Ethan campaigned for Kirsten Gillibrand in upstate New York when she ran for the House of Representatives.
Suddenly, she was appointed the senate seat from New York. Ethan thought it would be exciting to say hi to her and his campaign friends in the Gillibrand office in Washington, and I thought it would be really cool, as a constituent, to meet my Senator.
This is my first time to the Dirksen building, and it’s in a building, I thought senate offices were in the capitol, but no. We find her office with her name next to the door, not engraved in brass like many senators have, just simple, new, and flanked by an Amerian Flag and a flag of New York.
We open the door and it is a madhouse of phone calls, everyone is trying to talk to the new Senator. The energy is young and vibrant. Everyone in the front of the office doesn’t look like they are over 22 years old and it’s great to see how passionate they are about their jobs.
The walls are still bone white, there are boxes of papers everywhere, I imagined that when this was Hillary’s office, it must have looked pretty fancy, and I’m sure that the longer you stay in power, then you can really hire an interior designer and go crazy.
We couldn’t meet our senator, she was in meetings all day. I’m sure we could have met her if we could have waited, but we wanted to explore the rest of the capitol.
His friends were really nice and gave us some gallery passes which we never used. I saved them, they are really pretty, they looked like engraved money. They would look nice in a frame.