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innerspaceboy · 01-20-2023, 04:27 PM

Unemployment Update

My car broke down twice in January so far. Thankfully the repair expenses haven't been astronomical, I've broken down near my favorite repair shop, and I know I can trust them so that's okay.

I've had difficulty finding realistic potential jobs among my daily automated search queries. I get 60-90 newly-posted job listings in my email every morning but most are duplicates from cubicle farms posting hundreds of the same job.

It's exhausting spending days researching employers, authoring responses to interview questions, staging, filming, editing, and experimenting with compression standards to export emailable-sized-response videos, only to be told that hundreds of persons applied and I didn't make the final cut. I can't compete with hundreds of applicants for each job, especially with the exhaustive effort I put into each application.

I registered with the city's career counseling service, but my caseworker has been mostly non-responsive, as they explained that most of their clients have never used a computer or were recently incarcerated, so they've made me less of a priority.

As for unemployment benefits, that has been a nightmare. I've been phoning and logging into the NYS Unemployment website multiple times a day for the last 50 days. Every menu permutation on their phone system returns a message that "due to extreme call volume my call can't be taken at this time" and the call disconnects. The website updates daily and for the past 50 days has said "We are continuing to work on your application" for my initial waiting week from December 2nd of last year. I have had zero benefits and zero income for the entirety of those 50 days.

I tried the unemployment office downtown, but was told they closed their doors permanently when COVID happened, all staff work remotely now, and their phone number redirects to the state line that gives me the aforementioned recording.

In an act of desperation, I emailed the governor of NYS, and received her stock reply.

I'm starting to run out of steam here. But I'll keep trying.