Saturday, February 28, 2009  The Great Depression 2:The
Reckoning  Since my contract gig finished up, I went back on
unemployment. Usually, unemployment benefits roll over so if I
go on it, work for three months, I can still can hold on to the
three months I had before and add on whatever I just earned.
When I got my latest unemployment check, this didn't appear to
be true and that I had way less money in it than I had before.
This is not good.  I tried calling unemployment to see what's up
but I couldn't get through. This didn't surprise me as having
been in this situation before, I know EDD is hard to reach. One
of the ironies, of course, of recessions is that in order to
balance the state budget, people who work in unemployment are
laid off so that there's less people to handle the greatly
increasing numbers of unemployed.  Because I've gone through
this before, I went off to the EDD office because they have a
special phone line which makes it easier to get through. I
thought this was something only I kne