328 ANALYZING DATA
And now she found somebody that had a good dependable older little Toyota for like
$1,500. Well, if you have no money $1,500 might as well be $15 million. Somehow the
mental health center could come up with $400, just kind of seed money. So I came up with
$340 for maintenance, but that still left a bunch.
So we got creative. I wrote up enough money to cover insurance, car tags, and fees,
and, you know, called them interview clothing and gas knowing good and well that these
are things she is going to need but the money is really for the car. So she went and bought
her car.
So she finally moved... and lived happily ever after. Her little boy is still in school and
is doing great. She has advanced into a better position. They love her.
Everything worked out beautiful, but if we had gone by the rule book she would not
have gotten the car, she would not have gotten the job. She would have ended up back in
the hospital. (Story 1.1 in Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003, 6)CITIZEN-AGENT NARRATIVE“A Happy Ending” places the construction of the client’s identity, not policy implementation, at
the center of the narrative.^9 The client is a single mother with limited education and severe chronic
mental illness, not a promising start as the label “severe chronic mental illness” usually signals the
worker’s judgment that this is a troublesome client with little hope of success. Workers often
provide only what the law requires for clients with such limited prospects; they do not invest
much time, emotion, and effort into what they perceive as hopeless cases.
But the storyteller’s construction of client identity does not end with these easy labels. The
client was in the past a high achiever—“somebody who had been Miss Texas or Miss Oklahoma
or something”—who had fallen on hard times. The worker focused on her positive character
traits: She was a responsible single mom with a “little boy” coping with hard living conditions.
She is not presented as a fallen and demanding prima donna, as were other characters in other
stories we were told, but someone who, on her own, is trying to put her life back together. She is
someone who calls out for help and, as importantly, is someone who can be helped.
As the story unfolds the described character of the client is entwined with the decision making
of the worker. In story analysis it is essential to remember that the storyteller selects and presents
the descriptive details about the clients to explain (or justify) to the listener the reasons for the
judgments made and actions taken. In “A Happy Ending” the single mom had, on her own, ob-
tained a good job. She did not wait for the counselor to find her work, but now she needed a car
to get to work. She even found herself a reliable car, nothing flashy as would have befitted her
previous status as a beauty pageant queen; the contrasting characterization is embedded in the
storyteller’s description of “a good dependable older little Toyota.”
But here is where policy and worker judgment collided. Policy allowed for some “seed money”
and money for car maintenance but did not allow for vehicle purchase. Policy did not meet the
client’s needs, so, for this worthy client, the worker “got creative.” He “wrote up enough money
to cover insurance, car tags, and fees, and, you know, called them interview clothing and gas
knowing good and well that these are things she is going to need but the money is really for the
car.” In the story, the worker admits to fraud, albeit without labeling it as such explicitly, yet it is
this deliberate breaking of the rules—of sabotage or shirking so denounced in the common State-
Agent Narrative—that, in the end, leads to policy success. It was a happy ending for the client:
She bought the car and kept the job. But it was also, and importantly, a happy ending for the state,
which through the fraudulent act of this street-level worker was able to help a deserving citizen