Current Affairs #4

a play, some movies, a musical cockatiel; the new york state unemployment office

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The most pressing antagonist in my life right now is the New York State Unemployment Office, which I can only assume based on my personal experience is one of the most inefficient, useless, and mismanaged departments in the entire country. Coming up on five months since I first filed my claim (and one month until the period that I can receive unemployment ENDS), my claim is still stuck in the purgatory of being “under review.”

I have called more times than I can count and the employees receive me with a progressively lessened veneer of politeness. Aside from my finicky 1099 forms, this type of wait isn’t even out of the norm—at least three of my other NYC-based friends who’ve needed unemployment in the last few years all waited at minimum five months for their payments. The department emphasizes that cases should be finalized within 3-6 weeks, though exceptions can take longer. But aside from one case, none of these friends had particularly complicated jobs.

Which begs the question: What is going on at the New York State Unemployment Office? Are they understaffed and underfunded (probably)? Do they just not care about how quickly they help people (probably)? It makes you wonder what people are supposed to do if they have no savings to fall back on, while the government sector that’s supposed be help them just hangs them to dry for months on end. This doesn’t even get into the fact that the claims center phone line is strategically designed to be unhelpful. As I write this, I am currently on hold with the governor’s office, so I can be transferred to the queue for the claims center. The claims line itself refuses to put you on hold if there are a certain number of people already in it, which is the case every single day.

Luna the cockatiel

In the meantime, I’m back at my parents’ house, and the cockatiel has become demented in the month since my last visit. It’s five months old, and is no longer quite so timid but instead oppressively curious. This is a good thing in part, because it no longer recoils at our touch and has discovered the carnal pleasures of head scritches. But like a puppy, it wants to explore everything and it wants to bite and chew and eat everything. This morning, I had to leave the kitchen table where I had stationed myself to write, and where the bird was on a tear frantically encircling the table and fixated on intermittently gnawing at my laptop.