When Will It End?
It’s not exactly a Kafka-esque nightmare, because Kafka was never on the dole. Fuckin’ guy was employed for most of his adult life, and when he got sick his employer gave him a fuckin’ pension. You’re not Kafka. You will never be able to retire. You will be working until you take your final, pained, breath. But for now, you’re unemployed.
So what are you gonna do with the three hours and 48 minutes of your life you’re spending on hold with the unemployment office until your call is unceremoniously dropped? Allow me, dear reader, to provide a few suggestions.
Analyze the hold music
Peel back the layers of the instrumental soft rock track that plays on an endless loop like an onion until said onion makes you cry. Questions you could ask yourself include:
Do you think the master track itself sounds this compressed? If so, who do you think produced it, Rick Rubin?
Are the session musicians who recorded this two months or two decades ago (there’s a timelessness to the track, and you’re not just saying that because you can no longer remember a time in which you weren’t listening to it) also currently on hold with the unemployment department? Probably, right?
Each note resembles the last. There are no dynamics. There is no nuance. Yet the song does not fade out — it definitively ends, and with a flourish at that. How did they know when to stop?
Google “on hold with edd beyond closing time”
On the third page of results you will find a Reddit post wherein someone has asked the question “I know this is an old thread but has anyone beaten my record? Lol on hold for 3 Hours and 31 minutes waiting to speak with someone.” Yes, you will telepathically reply. Yes. Lol.
Clean your bathroom
It’s fucking repugnant. You live like this?
Stress eat
If you’re unemployed, you have a license to print food stamps, which means the only worldly pleasures you will be able to experience for the foreseeable future lie in caloric consumption. Go ahead, treat yourself to another organic blueberry or twelve. Welfare queendom looks good on you!
Plug your phone back in
Apple’s planned obsolescence has rendered your phone’s battery life a sliver of what it once was, back in those halcyon days when your digital window to the outside world was untainted and you could scroll endlessly without a second thought. I could be a front facing camera comedian, you tell yourself, glowingly written up in the New York Times and the AV Club, with development deals hanging out of my ass, if not for this goddamned iPhone 7.
Go fuck yourself
Why not? You’re probably already in bed anyway. And you’re probably too depressed to finish, so no messy cleanup!
Call the Medi-Cal office at the same time
You can multitask, you’re a ‘90s kid. Use Google Voice to dial an additional public assistance office on your computer and place one headset on each ear, letting the lines blare two entirely different yet strangely compatible hold songs. Soon (and by “soon,” I mean, “in the time it takes to watch a Masked Singer episode sans commercials”) you will learn you actually don’t have to reapply for Medi-Cal, as you’ve continually been on it since 2012. Which means you’ve been giving Covered California a hundred dollars a month for half a year for no fucking reason?
Call Covered California at the same time
You’ll reach a woman who is clearly working from home, because you can hear an infant softly crying in the distance. She really wants to help you, which is nice, because many people in her position do not. You’ll remember when you had to work part-time at the Department of Public Social Services in order to receive food stamps, as you were considered “underemployed,” as bureaucracy hadn’t (and, delight of delights, still hasn’t) gotten around to viewing non-hourly labor as labor, and what a soul crushing lesson in the misery machine that is bureaucracy that was. You’d answer the phone and hear people begging for assistance, their voices wracked with sobs, saying their worker was supposed to call them but didn’t and now their kids are going hungry. You will be unable to assist them even though you will, out of the corner of your eye, see their worker jovially laughing with another worker about nothing of consequence during business hours.
The Covered California woman will tell you she can’t do anything until you call Medi-Cal back and then call Covered California back. She’ll apologize for the inconvenience.
Wonder why every romantic relationship you’ve ever been in has failed
Surely the problem can’t be you, yet you’re the only common denominator in all of them. So...what’s up with that? Wait, you’ll realize, being a woman ruminating about past relationships is so hack. Maybe you should think about something equally miserable but non-gendered.
Wonder when you will “make it”
Someone who gets your newsletter, this newsletter, texted you a while back to ask if you had a lit agent. You don’t. They said they’d pass your name to one, then told you the name thereof. The name sounded familiar. You looked it up — it was someone who had already ghosted you years ago. Every lit agent you have ever been in contact with, as a matter of fact, has ghosted you. One told you that, in order to get a book deal, you would either have to develop a marketable schtick or, and this is a direct quote, “get more famous.” You begrudgingly appreciated their honesty.
Stare at that ever-growing crack in the wall
When will the big one hit? They’ve been saying it’s coming your whole life. And sure, the Loma Prieta in ‘89 was pretty bad, but you’d hesitate to call it the apocalyptic “big one” you’d always been instructed to fear. Yes, people died, but you didn’t. When will you die?
Please continue to hold
Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.