year it's been, that quarantine life, tw capitalism
via https://ift.tt/2XKqBFR
I did not get through to the dep’t of Labor on the phone. But, whilst on
the phone, I pecked out a much more emotional message to them on the system
I’ve been using for the last four months, upon which I’ve been sending them
biweekly “… hello? did you need more information or what? Please to let me
know if thou couldst, I await thy reply on tenterhooks and whatnot”
messages with a very professional tone, and I did get a response to that;
apparently flipping out eventually works, or maybe it was my turn and they
just needed a prodding, I don’t know.
They want my social security card, which I don’t own. In the beginning of
all this, I tried to go to the SSA website and request one, and they make
you make an account with them, and it glitched and locked me out before I
could finish creating it, so I sent them a despairing message and waited a
couple of weeks for them to write back with a very generic ah, maybe call
us, maybe come in person when we reopen which is not now, sort of message.
I went desperately to look again for my social security card, and I did
find a bunch of old paperwork but the most amusing thing I found was this:
(behind the cut, a long story)
[image description: the author’s freshman year ID card from her high
school, an amateurishly laminated piece featuring her photo in the upper
left– she is a nerdy squishy-faced 14-year-old with big round glasses and
untidy blonde hair in pigtail braids and she’s wearing a homemade plaid
blue vest, and the card lists the school year as 1994-1995 and her
signature is a childish block-capital scrawl of her name.]
anyway, after lying on the floor for a while crying (thanks for supportive
suggestions, y’all, but I was not in a place to be able to be suggested to,
so I could not take any of them, but thank you– however, I would like to
point out, the DOL does NOT have any button or menu option to let you
speak to a human no matter how you try, that is not an option and cannot be
gamed, that’s not up for dispute. You can press 0 all you like, it’s not
going to do shit; the only parts of the phone tree that led to a potential
human were the ones that went straight to the recorded “no humans are
available” message and hung up on you. They don’t fuck around with that.),
I dragged myself upright and Dude fed me, which helped, and then I made
another attempt on the SSA website.
And I managed to get in. It was dicey for a bit, they wanted me to put in
some things to verify my identity and of the four options, three were
things I literally did not possess– I’ve never received a direct deposit
from them, for example, and I’ve never had a 1040SE form, and I don’t
actually have a credit card that’s not a debit card– but I managed to dig
out a W-2 from 2015, which was what they wanted, a random number from that
so they could tell it was me, right? anyway… IT WORKED.
It worked, and I went immediately, cringingly, to look at their records of
my income, and—
they have it all. They know all of it. They know what I made last year, the
year before– all of it, even when I know my W-2 had the wrong SSN on it.
I know it was wrong, that’s why I’m so deep in all of this shit.
And yet. Somehow. The Social Security Administration knows all.
(Including that I currently make less than half of what I did my first year
out of college, when I was fucking miserable and spent a full 60% of my
salary on rent. Fuuuuuck Westchester County. It was depressing to
reconsider that. I have never made very much money; in capitalist terms, I
am a total fucking failure. It’s all there, starting in 1999 with my
college work-study job; many of my adult years have been spent with a
four-figure income.)
So it’s good to know that, and that takes a huge burden off my
consciousness.
Now, am I going to get my unemployment any time ever??
Who fucking knows. But. I thought I’d have to go in person to the Social
Security office, and now I don’t. And so I went through their website to
request a new card.
They were like, OK, yes, you can do that, but firstoff, we invite you to
reconsider: you don’t need one. If you know the number, which you do,
that’s how you got here, you don’t need this. Nobody really needs to see
this.
I was like nice try bub, and went through and made the request. Now they
have to apparently manually review this, and then it’s 7-10 business days
to send it, and who fucking knows how long that first bit is going to be,
and with the mail as it is (though it’s been fine for me, undeservedly),
who knows. But.
It seems like it’s solvable. Maybe it’s solvable. I don’t have to try to
get all my W-2s since 2008, for starters, so that’s a huge relief.
I still don’t know about the Dep’t of Labor. I don’t know if they’ll accept
my passport, which was what I sent them instead. (They wanted driver’s
license, which I have, and SS card, which I don’t, and I was like well, you
need an SSC to get a passport, and I had one at the time, so this may not
have the information you want but it ought to go a fair distance toward
proving I am who I say the fuck I am, and also you can ask the Social
Security Administration, I’ve just re-verified my address with them and
they apparently know everything about me.)
(Did you know, by the way, how much information there is about you in
databases that financial institutions can access? Middle-Little has
recently been trained on how to use those databases to verify identity over
the phone [she works for a subsidiary of Morgan Stanley, I think], and they
had her look herself up first, and the first question was “what color was
your 1992 Jeep Cherokee” and she was like “holy shit, I forgot I ever had
that car” but I remember it, she put fuzzy black like fake fur seat covers
on it and drove it down to the Jersey Shore in 2002 for the 4th of July and
I rode along as far as Jersey City sweating my ass off in no a/c and let me
tell you, I did not like the fake fur with the sweat, no thanks, that car
was forest green with a tan interior and the previous owner had been a
smoker so she had one of those lil trees in it that didn’t do jack shit
except make it smell like one of those lil trees. Anyway that weekend I
stayed in Jersey City and fucked Dude and we’ve been together ever since
and he wasn’t that great in bed but I kept him anyway because he was great
everywhere else and guess what, he grew into it. None of that’s in the
database, though, just the green car. Well, he’s in the database, but if
they know what he was like in bed in 2002 I’d like to petition for them to
remove that because I wasn’t that great in bed either to be honest and
that’s nobody’s business but my memoirist’s and even that’s subject to
editorial glossing-over as needed for the sake of the story.)
Anyway. Whether I ever get paid for the last five months or not, at least I
know that the taxes I’ve been paying are actually being credited to me,
somewhere. I still don’t actually know if NYS or the feds ever gave me my
tax refunds, but I know the SSA knows I haven’t been sitting at home on my
ass this whole time. Not that I’m earning much, but I’m working, and that’s
something.
(God, it’s so hard not to feel worthless when you look at your life in
numbers like that, and think, that’s it? That’s it. That is it. I’ve never
even broken the 30k mark in a year. Fuck. I hate capitalism, that it can
take my whole adult life and break it down to this series of numbers that
are so pathetic.)
(So yeah when my various educational institutions ask for donations, I’m
always like… why can’t I afford this? Why can’t I give them money? I always
meant to. Well, genius, it’s because you’re fucking poor.)
ANYHOW. I do feel better. I then proceeded to eat a bunch of ice cream at
4:30 pm with Dude, who has been having a fucking rotten time at work and
knocked off early and we made a grocery list and went together to
plague-stricken Wegmans and bought ourselves a cheese plate and some Tater
Tots, so there.
That was probably the only day off I’m going to have in this 30-day stretch
that won’t be spent driving, so, that was me enjoying it to the fullest.
i’m going to go attempt to clean out the freezer into a steamer basket
(most of the bulk is the Chinese bao we impulse-bought at Asia Mart when
the Pandemic Hit and nobody was shopping at Asia Mart) and thence into my
face.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
