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innerspaceboy · 03-13-2023, 09:01 AM

I'm going to lose my home in a few weeks.

I just had my appointment with the unemployment office. The agent said that next month will be our final meeting. He said he will deny me the normal 26 weeks of unemployment benefits if I haven't secured paying work in the next 4 weeks. If I don't have a job by then, he will hand me the first job he Googles. If I refuse to work it, (because I'm enrolled in the apprenticeship I've qualified for full-time), then he will terminate my unemployment benefits immediately. He doesn't care that the apprenticeship will place me in a full-time career that pays twice what I would have otherwise made.

I don't know what else to do. My career counselor has been useless, sending sentence fragment emails rife with misspellings weeks after I reach out to her and ignoring everything I've explained in prior communications, drastically slowing the process. I tried calling the Unemployment Office to speak with the supervisor but got the "extremely high call volume" recording I've gotten every time I've called for the last 4 months and it hangs up. I have no one to advocate for me to the unemployment office. I can't take it. I'm going to lose my house. I'm going to be on the street.

The prestigious apprenticeship will be an incredible challenge on its own, but now I have to grapple with being homeless at the same time. And without medical insurance, I can't consult my talk therapist through any of this.

This is all because the apprenticeship doesn't fit NYS Unemployment's "mould." I'm sorry. I just really can't handle this.