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Day 57 - A Wild Ride

Unemployment is a wild ride, y'all.

Not just the job market, although that's certainly enough to make me want to get off the ride before I vomit, but I mean the Unemployment Benefits. Any interaction with the Department of Labor has left me baffled for at least the rest of the day.

Today, I had a mandatory meeting with my assigned Unemployment Counselor. Or maybe Employment Counselor? Unsure. He was a very nice man, and he made the process as painless as possible, but I couldn't help but wonder if it was actually helpful to anyone.

I got there, was welcomed by two different security desks, and was ushered into a room for a brief video for everyone who was attending a 10am meeting with their counselor. That was a whole two of us. Scratch that, the other person didn't show up, so just me and this guy running the most boring video in the whole world. I am not joking. They read to me in the most monotone voice someone could muster, word for word, the documents that I would be handed later by my counselor. The whole thing took less than 15 minutes, but I swear I almost fell asleep. I didn't, because that seems rude when you're the only one it is playing for, but there was at least one yawn.

Turns out that the guy playing the video wasn't my counselor. My counselor ended up walking into the back of the conference room about a minute before the video ended so he could walk me across the hall to his office... which was also the office of the person who showed the video. Very efficient. From there, we had to fill out a bunch of questionnaires that NYS requires him to ask me. In another great use of time, it was all questions that I already answer on a weekly basis in order to claim my benefits.

After I answered some more very obvious questions ("do you feel like you need computer training?"... sir, my last job was virtual and in IT, and I just sent you my 4 resumes from my laptop that I brought with me... so no), he handed me a paper copy of a journal to track my job search efforts in. I laughed, because I had also emailed him my Excel spreadsheet tracking my job applications and activities I've attended that count towards "job search progress," like a networking event or training course.

As it turns out, there was not much that he could really help me with.

Ok, that's not entirely true, and I want to be clear - my criticisms are not of him. He was very nice, very funny, and also found me a job I was qualified for in the pay grade I want, and I applied to it when I got home. As always, it seems like my criticisms are of the process NYS has set up. My time with him would have been much more useful if he could have used his resources to find me more jobs that I haven't come across yet. He probably could have reviewed my resume and given me additional criticism. Based on the small amount of time that I had with him, I'm sure he has a lot of opinions on how he can best help the people he sees and is assigned to, but he probably doesn't have time to implement or develop them because he's busy filling out forms that ask if I'm a farm worker. (I did not mention my successful tomato and zucchini crops this year, but maybe I should have in order to open up more opportunities for myself.) For all I know, he had the 11am shift of showing the most boring video in the world to the 1 person that shows up, isn't her counselor, but wasted time walking to and from his desk and the conference room to do that.

All I'm saying is, I know we want "success metrics" and ways to prove people are making progress in their job search and ways to prove the Counselors are doing their jobs, but it seems like the process is probably standing in the way of actual progress.

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