One of these nights I'm going to write about my horrible decade-plus run of bad luck, but tonight I'm going to describe my unemployment horror stories. In January 2020 I found myself without a job for the first time since I started working. My immediate reaction was to drink myself to death, which put me in the hospital for pancreatitis, but I stayed there for two weeks because my body chose that particular time to go into alcohol withdrawal and send me down the mother of all hallucinations for just that long. Maybe I've talked about that before. If not, I'll do so in the near future.
But when I got through that, I found myself scraping around for a job. My first thought was unemployment, so I applied. Holy shit, talk about exercises in futility. It was even worse because COVID was rearing its ugly head, so no one was actually at the office. They made sure you couldn't contact them through the internet, because state governments are too good to use the internet for correspondence. You have to call them, and after being on hold forever you'll get someone who tells you you're in the wrong place and transfers you to someone who might even transfer you again. By the time you're off the phone, three hours will have passed. And then, if you're lucky enough to make progress, you'll get a letter telling you when to be available for a phone call to help determine your eligibility. If you're supremely lucky, they'll actually call you.
Because they didn't call me. When I tried calling them, guess what. Whoever was supposed to call me lied and said he did. He did not. I sat by my phone in a place with great reception, and it never rang. They claimed he left a voicemail, which he did not. Oh well. We'll send you another letter for your next phone call, which they did. Did they call? Nope.
And then there's the IL job board. It fucking blows. Almost all the posts are from Aerotek. But hey, Aerotek took me on and got me a job in Bannockburn. It's a shit commute, but what the hell? And then that job kept putting off the start time again and again, and the guy who took me on at Aerotek got a promotion, and the guy who replaced him lost my number and didn't call me back until I was in training for the job I have now.
If you're unemployed in IL, don't rely on the job board. Go anywhere but the job board. Fucking throw a letter in a bottle into Lake Michigan, and you'll get a job a lot faster than if you stuck with the job board.
I eventually gave up on unemployment, and the job hunt irritated the fuck out of me. I put out hundreds of applications, and in all of them I noted that I can't do physical labor because I have a bad leg. The only jobs I was offered, sight unseen and without interviews, were warehouse jobs. Jobs I would have to stand up for eight hours a day. I can't even stand up for eight fucking minutes.
So I got frustrated and applied for disability. Yet another exercise in futility. They did not get back to me until I got a job. I would have considered sex work, but even sex is kind of strenuous for me these days. I actually find myself trying to avoid it, which would have shocked a younger me.
It's just a fucking mess, and all of it is broken. The whole system needs an overhaul because there are a lot of people without jobs right now, and because of COVID there are a lot more homeless people out there. During the summer of 2020, I can't describe to you how many homeless there were out in the suburbs. In the city they're everywhere. In the suburbs, you'll find one at an intersection or on an off ramp. There were literally homeless people on dividers at every intersection on the highways. Mostly two of them working opposite sides, but I've seen four in each direction in some places. It's fucking insane. I'll bet a lot of them wouldn't be out there if unemployment did its fucking job.
There is one thing IL did pretty well. ONE. And that was the LINK card they gave me. Granted, I could only use it to buy food (and not even at fast food places, just stores), but I bought a lot of food with what I was given. Without that LINK card things would have gotten even worse for me. Now that I have a job, I have until the 10th to tell them that I made more than the amount I'm allowed to in a month. Which means I have one more LINK "payday" before I lose the service. It was nice while it lasted.
And anyone who bitches and moans about people who would abuse the system, I offer the words of Harrison Ford in the movie BRUNO: "Fuck off." I would rather have a few scammers taking advantage than have thousands of people out of work and suffering. Suffering like I did.
And hey. Maybe, just maybe, stop taxing unemployment benefits you savage, merciless, pusillanimous pieces of shit.
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