So I lost my job of almost two years in July because I freaked out and melted down. Technically I went on medical leave and never came back, but functionally I lost my job because I went cray-cray and couldn't go back without getting more cray. I had a false start in a local liquor store when they transferred me to the attached supermarket's deli. The overall disorganization of the department and generally shitty scheduling and labor practices combined with a string of asshole customers to create another craytomic bomb, and I walked out. You are now caught up on the last two months of suckage in my life.
There was one glimmer of hope in the darkness: unemployment. I thought for sure that, as someone who'd gone from making sixteen hundred dollars a month to five hundred dollars a month to zero, I'd be able to get short-term assistance until I got back on my feet. And bonus, they'd help me develop my job-hunting skills and find something suitable. Right? Right?!
Fuckin' nope. After a month of jumping through hoops for their information requests, sending in letters from my previous employer, wage histories, and information from my doctors, they tell me I didn't make enough money to collect. I can still appeal it, mind you, but fuckin' what? Apparently I have to have a weekly income average of $233 for like an eighteen month period or something to get unemployment. And for the first like...six months of working at my last job I was getting fuck all for hours, so I got shot down.
They didn't turn me down because I was on bad terms with my previous employer, or because I was some kind of crackhead. They shot me down because I was TOO FUCKING POOR.
How. In the everloving fuck. Does that even WORK?
The last time I applied for food stamps, which my girlfriend and I have decided would be roughly equivalent to a goddamn revolution and us getting a third roommate, I was told I made too much. Bear in mind, this was during the period where I was making so little that it dragged down my average too much for Unemployment to give me the hookup.
What's a bitch gotta do to get some help in this fuckin' country? I can't go back to school because I can't get grants because I defaulted on my student loans because I can't get a fucking job to pay me enough to pay the fucking loans. I can't get foodstamps because I make too much, and I can't get unemployment because I make too little. I was TOO GODDAMN WELL-WRITTEN to get rent assistance (literally, they made me rewrite my statement twice and I was still told it wouldn't go through because they'd read my letter and wonder why I needed help) even though I had a fucking pre-eviction notice in my hands and a bank statement with a negative balance.
So now I'm sitting with like two months' worth of rent do, my electric and water teetering on the brink of getting shut off, my car in such a state that if I get pulled over I'm losing my license for like...ever... and what the fuck are my options? My girlfriend can't support my dead weight any longer. She's at the end of HER fucking savings now, too. We've got eleven bucks between us until Friday until she gets a check that's gotta go to bills, and which will leave us with no food in the house but some pretzel rods from two months ago and maybe five bucks to go grocery shopping on. I've only got half a week's worth left of my meds, which is Kind Of A Big Deal since I need the psycho-active ones to FUNCTION. And the gubment is telling me that I'm in just the wrong income bracket to get help.
I put in a new application for benefits with the welfare and foodstamps people. My shrink says I'm not likely to be successful in applying for disablity, because I'm young and I don't have a very long history of my "condition" disrupting my ability to work (since I didn't bother getting fucking diagnosed until it started causing MAJOR problems at work). I guess at this point I'm going to have to try going back to fast food, in spite of the fact that the whole thing that triggered my meltdown in the first place was, you guessed it, fast food. Maybe the meds will keep me stable. Who knows? Unless, like, they run the fuck out. Which they're going to do in like four days if I don't get some kind of divine wallet intervention before then.
It's frustrating. This is the longest I've ever gone without a job, and it's only been like a month. I've worked my ass off since I was eighteen years old, and all I have to show for it is a buck twelve in my checking account.
And people say this country's socioeconomic structure isn't fucked. Godmotherfuckin'damn.
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