what a day

[dragonlady7]

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.

Comments

[heartofoshun]

Best news so far about the unemployment payment mess--it's a tiny glimmer of hope. I will keep my fingers crossed that you see some of that money before this country devolves into a total dystopia hellscape relying upon barter and not money. Although you would do better than many people surviving in that setting.

Isn't it amazing what the Social Security Administration knows? I really do not care. I have no secrets--but I do have memory lapses. They know things I have long forgotten about where I've lived and worked and how much money I made.

Here is a sad statement. My daughter was making this past year, with a roughly comparable level of requisite skills and education, what I was making in the year 2000. Both of us were working in admin jobs in toney, well-funded institutions in midtown Manhattan. If that does not tell one something about this country. I do not know what does!

[dragonlady7]

Yeah-- wages have just frozen. I know my sister, with a Master's, is making less than my mother made as an entry level teacher in the early 90s. How is it that this has not alarmed any economists thusfar????

It does make me feel shitty that I didn't just... go for it as a novelist out of college. Everyone was like "you won't make any money" and here I am having worked for wages my whole life and not made any money either. WTF man.

[buttonsbeadslace]

Ugh yes that "Do you Really Need a physical copy of your card?" message, as if anybody would go through all this nonsense if they didn't really need it. Like, I agree, SSA, I *shouldn't* need a physical copy, but my local DMV does not agree so here we are.

[dragonlady7]

I just thought it was hilarious.