The changes could further strain an already overwhelmed system: Of the nearly 15,000 calls made on average each day to DTA in November, nearly 4,500 were unable to connect, according to DTA’s own statistics. Another 7,000 were answered by a voice assistant, and just under 3,000 people were connected to a call center.

Dany Rodriguez, a 41-year-old DTA caseworker, tries not to focus too much on the politics, or how overwhelming the need is. “I just want to help clients,” said Rodriguez, who has been at the agency for five years and handles about 220 clients who use SNAP, cash benefits, or both. “I want to be there for them, to support them.”

Rodriguez started her morning taking calls from clients. Some, she would be able to help. For many others, the needs were too great, and the problems too deep: decades of homelessness, persistent health issues, unemployment, economic marginality. Rodriguez could try, but she was limited by the tools at her disposal.

First, there was a woman who wanted to know if she could get part of her gas bill covered for the winter. Like many SNAP recipients, she works as a personal care attendant, and with her wages low — around $17-$22 an hour — she was finding the bill “is too much, I can’t do that.” Rodriguez replied that the application for the state’s Home Energy Assistance Program, which can cover winter heating bills for some low-income households, was already in the mail. The woman thanked her profusely.

Rodriguez went to call a mother of three, taking a deep breath before dialing the number. She had to tell the client that she was no longer eligible for a cash assistance program DTA oversees, since she now makes about $2,000 a month as a cleaner. Even with the income, the mother is financially strapped: She pays $600 a month for rent, plus $780 a month in child care. Her income is so low she’ll continue to receive $994 in SNAP, the max for a family of four.

Next, Rodriguez called a client to recertify his application, something all SNAP users are required to do every six to 12 months. Despite having an appointment, he didn’t pick up. The man is homeless, bouncing between family members. He’s also disabled. Rodriguez wasn’t surprised he missed the call. She rescheduled his appointment and mailed a notice to his mom’s house. If he doesn’t get back to her within 30 days, his case will close and he’ll have to reapply.

Through each phone call, Rodriguez remained composed. She never slouched, her breathing was steady. In over three hours, she took just one sip from her pink Stanley water bottle and didn’t touch the granola bar on her desk. Throughout the morning, she toggled between three screens, keeping color-coded calendar reminders as notes to herself alongside an unwieldy client database.

The Jackson Square office where Rodriguez works is new, created to take some of the workload off the much larger Nubian Square office just a couple miles down the road. One staffer described the client load there as a “deluge.” Just over a quarter of the 34,454 people who visited a DTA office in November did so because they otherwise could not get through to staff.

Late morning, Rodriguez saw her first in-person client.

The visit was unexpected. The man showed up at reception, said he had been calling and had not gotten through. His case had been closed in October, when he started making too much money to receive any cash benefits. He still received some SNAP, though just $24 a month.

“What am I going to do, buy candy?” he told the receptionist, who popped her head into Rodriguez’s office. “I just want to give you a heads up,” she said. ”He’s mad!”

Rodriguez quickly reviewed his case, cross-referencing his name with work numbers shared by several agencies and employers. The man started working for a moving company in August where he was slated to have 40-hour work weeks at $22 an hour. But often, he only logged 20 hours, sometimes as few as six.

After sitting down in a corner chair, the client explained he lost his job just after Christmas and was now living in a shelter. He wanted to apply for cash benefits again. Rodriguez explained he had to first apply for unemployment, and only if that’s denied could he apply for cash benefits. He would need a termination letter and a new designation of disability from a doctor. On the other hand, without any income, his SNAP would go up, to $298 a month.

Rodriguez has an unusually intimate window into her clients’ lives. With this client, she learned about how his disability makes holding a job nearly impossible, which embarrasses him. When calling another client, she could hear the din of busy Boston outside: the rev of buses, the rush of traffic. She asked if anything had changed in his life. “Same situation financially, same situation, staying with family. I am still homeless.” She asked if he has any other income. “No. I wish.”

Chatting at the end of their call, the client asked whether it’s true that people can no longer use SNAP to buy sweets. “I don’t buy any myself, but you’re telling a mom you can’t buy her kids cookies?”

Rodriguez answered plainly, “We haven’t received any instructions about that.”

She has seen how news about SNAP changes can impact her clients. In the last year, she noticed fewer people coming to the office — many of Rodriguez’s clients are immigrants. “They’re afraid just to even walk out of their house,” she said.

“I love what I do,” she continued. “The political piece is something else. I try to avoid it.”

Rodriguez turned back to her computer, and clicked through her database, to see who needed help next.

This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

Mara Kardas-Nelson can be reached at mara.kardas-nelson@globe.com.

The TV star fisherman who vanished with his crew off the coast of Massachusetts after their boat sank reportedly had a concerning call with his pal – hours before the tragedy on Friday.

Gus Sanfilippo, skipper of the Lily Jean, and six others are presumed dead after their 72-foot fishing vessel capsized when temperatures at sea were a bone-chilling 12 degrees.

Fisherman Sebastian Noto claimed he spoke with Sanfilippo — a fifth-generation commercial fisherman out of Gloucester, Mass. — at around 3 a.m, where the two discussed the outdoor conditions.

“I quit. It’s too cold,” Sanfilippo reportedly told Noto, according to NBC Boston. “He was calm. He just couldn’t do the cold because the air holes were freezing.”

Noto became concerned when there was no sign of Sanfilippo hours later.

“I was about 30 miles east of him. We usually work together all the time. We are like glue man. We give a lot of information back-and-forth,” Noto told the outlet.

A Coast Guard helicopter and boat scrambled to the area where the boat sent a beacon alert distress signal – around 25 miles off the coast of Cape Ann, Mass. This search was suspended on Saturday.

There was no Mayday call from the vessel and around 1,000 square miles were searched, according to Coast Guard officials.

Crews deployed aircraft, cutters and small boats over 24 hours as they battled polar conditions.

“The decision to suspend the search was incredibly difficult,” said Capt. Jamie Frederick, commander of Coast Guard Sector Boston. “Our thoughts and prayers are with all the family members and friends of the lost crew of the Lilly Jean, and with the entire Gloucester community during this heartbreaking time.” 

The cause of the incident is under investigation 

Sanfilippo and his crew on the Lily Jean starred in an episode of “Nor’Easter Men” which aired on the History Channel in 2012. The crew spent days at sea trying to find seafood.

One body has been found and six others are missing, according to WFXT. An empty life raft and debris were also found in the water.

Environmental biology graduate Jada Samitt, 22, was on board the boat, her family told the outlet.

Her devastated aunt Heather Michaels said being at sea was Samitt’s “dream.”

“This is something she loved and put her heart and soul into,” Michaels said.

Vito Giacalone, head of the Gloucester Fishing Community Preservation Fund, said he was left “heartbroken” by the sinking.

“To have that many lives lost all at once, we haven’t seen that in a long time.”

With Post wires

I like Cape Cod Potato Chips — not enough to buy them when they’re not on sale, but they are better than average, and they’re local, or were, until recently.

Most of the production had long since been transferred to free American states, but a vestigial footprint was left behind, in Hyannis. The little factory, which still employed 49 people, used to be a decent-sized tourist attraction.

But as of July, everything’s gone. As the corporate owner, Campbell’s Soup, noted in a press release:

“The site no longer makes economic sense for the business.”

Couldn’t the same thing be said about the entire state of Massachusetts? It no longer makes economic sense.

Or any other kind of sense, for that matter.

The flight last week of Cape Cod chips from Cape Cod was a mere diversion, small potatoes you might say, from the larger pattern of catastrophes here in Massachusetts.

Consider this ongoing cold snap. Just a couple of weeks ago, Gov. Maura Healey made a big announcement. Hydro Quebec had just “flipped a switch,” and now those nice uber-woke Canadians would be providing 25% of the state’s electrical needs, at a savings of $50 million.

Her coven of no-nonsense gals and transitioning beta males began cheering wildly.

Fast forward to last weekend. Hydro Quebec had some, uh, problems, as woke enterprises are wont to do. Plus, global warming took the same weekend off in Canada as it did here. Demand skyrocketed in La Belle Province as temperatures plummeted and output failed.

Guess what happened? The Canadians “flipped a switch” — to off. And Massachusetts was screwed, or would have been, if we hadn’t had fossil fuels to fall back on. Again. Forty percent of our electricity last weekend was generated by… oil.

Not cleaner stuff like natural gas — Maura shut down two pipelines, remember? Or nukes — thanks, Clamshell Alliance!

No, it was oil that saved the day. Oil from free America bailed out the virtue-signaling, totally incompetent Democrats here.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

Then there was wind power, another of Maura’s pet topics. Last week, the wind-power green scam artists were back in federal court, arguing to be permitted to keep squandering billions more on those insane offshore windmills that produce next to no energy, but plenty of pollution.

Do you know how much energy “wind” generated for New England’s hard-pressed electric grid last weekend? According to the Wall Street Journal, less than the burning of wood and garbage.

If wind and solar power are the future, it’s going to be very cold and dark in New England.

You know the old joke.

Q. What did Democrats use for light before candles?

A. Electricity.

Meanwhile, in the political arena, the state continued trying to prevent the feds from arresting and deporting any of the illegal-alien criminals they have welcomed into Massachusetts on full lifetime welfare.

The Democrats claim the federal government has no right to come in and re-impose law and order in the Commonwealth.

Yet simultaneously, the state attorney general went to court to force nine local towns to acquiesce to a crackpot state mandate requiring them to build “public housing,” which is now a euphemism for flooding tranquil working-class communities with hordes of the non-working classes, most of them from the Third World.

So much for insuring domestic tranquility.

This lawsuit against the towns was filed by the attorney general, Andrea Campbell, who has such a commitment to the celebration of diversity that she has fled Boston for the bucolic, 86% white town of Dartmouth on the South Coast.

It’s far outside the confines of the targeted MBTA district. Dartmouth will never be affected by the fundamental transformation of America that Campbell fantasizes will soon be devastating Winthrop, Holden and the rest of the towns.

None of this makes any sense. The state argues that if the feds want to impose control over Taxachusetts, it’s somehow unconstitutional. But if Massachusetts arbitrarily decides to impose its control over the municipalities, it’s totally okay.

This was the nonsense that was going on here last week, just like every week. Maybe that’s why people would rather talk, at least for a moment or two, about defunct potato chip companies.

Nostalgia becomes a recurring theme in failing states — thinking about pleasant things that have vanished because they “no longer make economic sense.”

In Massachusetts, you can play the do-you-remember game with any kind of business sector — candy companies, banks, beer, even the computer companies that were once supposed to be the state’s savior. Digital, Wang, Data General, Prime, etc. All gone.

And now Cape Cod potato chips. These days I mostly grocery-shop at Aldi’s, where the house brand is Clancy’s. They’re made in Canada, which is also where State Line chips come from since the old Wilbraham plant was shuttered.

After the Cape Cod chips announcement, I asked my radio listeners if they remembered other old local brands. The lines lit up.

It’s kind of a sad topic, but not as depressing as talking about how Healey, Campbell et al. are taking a wrecking ball to absolutely everything normal in Massachusetts.

Callers mentioned Tri-Sum and Wachusett — according to their website, those two old rivals are now made “in the Northeast,” which doesn’t sound much like Worcester County. Remember Vincent’s, from Salem, with the witch on the bag or tin?

They brought up brands I’d never heard of — Hunt’s and Blackstone — or recalled only vaguely, like Boyd’s. In New Hampshire, they had Granite State.

I recalled my Aunt Mabel in Portland alternating between King Cole and Humpty Dumpty chips, depending on which brand was on sale at A&P.

And now Cape Cod chips become the latest ghost brand in New England. Maybe they’ll put up a marker at the shuttered factory gates on Breeds Hill Road. It’s a tradition in Massachusetts, just like the other announcement from Cape Cod’s owners last week.

“The company will provide impacted employees guidance on how to assess state assistance programs.”

Welfare — the last thing that makes economic sense for Massachusetts.