I recently found myself in a position familiar to many Americans – laid off from a temp job and having to restart unemployment benefits. But a technical glitch during the transition deactivated my claim. It was the kiss of death. The only way to reopen my claim was to speak directly to an Unemployment Benefits Customer Service Agent.
I don’t know about other places, but in Colorado it is virtually impossible to speak directly to an Unemployment Benefits Customer Service Agent.
Business hours are 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Friday. If you call the customer service number at 7:29:59, you get a recorded message saying that the office is closed. If you call at 7:30:05, the line is busy. The line stays busy from 7:30:05 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., when a recorded message again says the office is closed.
Apparently, the only time to get into the unemployment telephone system is between 7:30:00 and 7:30:04 – in those first seconds when the system goes live and before it gets overloaded.
Sometimes, instead of a busy signal, my call went through to something called the Unemployment Benefits Self-Service Menu. A nice man apologized for the fact that no Unemployment Benefits Customer Service Agents were available on the self-service menu, then offered several unhelpful options before hanging up.
I was trapped. There was no other way to contact an Unemployment Benefits Customer Service Agent. The office in downtown Denver was not open to the public. The Website didn’t take e-mail. On an upgraded part of the site, I found a place to click to “Reactivate an Existing Claim,” exactly what I needed…but that application wasn’t yet available.
I found myself spending a good part of the day hitting the redial button and loathing the unctuous recorded voice on the Unemployment Benefits Self-Service Menu, cursing and concocting vicious parodies:
Welcome to the Unemployment Benefits Self-Serving Menu. We are sorry, but all of our customer service agents are busy not serving other customers. Perhaps one of the following self-serving telephone options can help:
To get the runaround, press 1.
To get the runaround in Spanish, press 2.
To not speak to a customer service agent, press 3.
To be blown off, press 4.
To be blown off and mocked by a professional insult comedian, press 5.
To end this call, simply take your phone and cram it, Loser.
I was livid. Didn’t these bureaucrats get it? People were desperate out here in the non-working world. We needed our unemployment to put gas in the car, buy food, pay the rent. How many thousands of other Coloradans were in my boat, wrongfully denied benefits and unable to speak to a customer service agent to straighten things out?
The unemployment telephone system was a scandal. But no one had lost their job over it, not the political appointee who ran the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment or any of his flunkies. It was enough to drive a man to make a public spectacle of himself, to picket on a downtown street, contact the media, engage in civil disobedience.
Before I could make my sign, though, something incredible happened. I’d been proactive in addition to hitting redial. I’d sent a fax, e-mailed the CDLE’s PR director, called lower level bureaucrats in the department who answered their phones, left messages… One Saturday morning, a nice man named George called me at home and got my claim reactivated. I hung up, stunned.
I had spoken to an Unemployment Benefits Customer Service Agent.
Martin Rush lives in Denver. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
