I Tamed You, Bureaucracy!

I got laid off in March, but since I was a community college teacher, my last day of work was June 11th, the end of the school year. On June 14th, I filed for unemployment. After destroying most of my house looking for tax forms, I spent thirty minutes on hold waiting to talk to a representative to make sure I had done everything.

"Have I done everything?" I asked, once I had finally gotten her on the phone. "Are you absolutely sure I've done everything?"

"You've done everything," she said. "I guarantee it. Your money will arrive by the end of next week."

It didn't. Instead I got a letter from the state. It said, more or less:

With sixty-eight dollars and twenty-three cents in my bank account, a fair supply of lint, a bag of Kimchee Dumplings in the freezer, and the gas light glowing brightly in my Honda Civic, I envisioned my future of entrapment and starvation. And like all well-educated people with a head on their shoulders…I called my mom in total hysteria. For about twenty minutes, I sounded like this:

Once I had yelled myself hoarse, I did fax in the form. More precisely, I printed it, signed it, scanned it, e-mailed it to my parents, and then they faxed it. Then, I waited. One week passed. Two weeks passed. At the end of the second week, I called the unemployment office back.

"Your call is important to us," the machine insisted, as minute after minute drained from my life.

"FUCK YOU!" I said, but it did not respond.

After my body had had time to grow roots into my computer chair, I finally got someone on the phone.

"I'm hungry," I said.

"Sometimes this process can take three weeks or more," the woman said. "Try again next week."

My menu that week looked approximately like this:

And then one glorious day, when I was about to die of hunger in my living room - I received a check. A real live check, for two backdated weeks. I danced around with this check for under 500 dollars with glee and joy. I held it to my heart and stroked its little watermark. And then, I went to the best deli within walking distance and ordered a seven dollar tuna fish sandwich with melted fresh mozzarella. I bought jerky and potato salad. I bought beer and cigarettes. I was a person again!

"Finally!" I thought. "I have accomplished what I need to accomplish! I can now look for work in peace without being forced to eat lint! I can be a productive person!! I CAN BE HAPPY!!!"

After spending a hundred dollars of my check on "extras," such as food, toilet paper, and toothpaste, I was about to sit down and make an unemployment budget. But then a feeling came over me, a feeling that this crazy tuna-eating toilet-paper-having self knew deep down in her guts. As if guided by an outside force, my legs carried me to my mailbox to retrieve the mail.

It had happened. There was a letter from The State. It said, roughly:

I had talked to so many people on the phone and asked them many, many times if there was anything at all I needed to do. No, they kept saying. No, no, no.

Rage filled my soul and bubbled to the surface. I would kill everyone in the world! THE WORLD DID THIS TO ME! I would get back at them! I WOULD GET BACK AT EVERYONE WHO HAD EVER WRONGED ME EVER!! I WOULD DESTROY!

In my rage, however, I started thinking about the consequences of being poor and hungry. I would no longer have beer, or tuna fish sandwiches. I would wash my hair with laundry soap. I would have to eat turpentine, and sleep outside on the gravel, after walking fifteen miles both ways, uphill, in the snow. And then, as quickly as the rage came, it changed into stage two: depression -

The letter also conveniently arrived on a Friday, which meant I couldn't possibly go into the office until Monday. I spent the weekend in a paranoid daze, thinking that I would have to wait another three weeks to buy beer.

Monday came, and I went to the unemployment office. Naturally, despite the fact that my closest office is in the kind of neighborhood where you can correctly guess that every woman in eyeshot wearing a miniskirt is a prostitute, there was no parking for three blocks. As I walked back to the office, I was offered a song "just for me," cocaine, and the "greatest pleasure of my life."

"I'm trying to cut back," I told them all.

And then, I arrived at the building. In my memory, it looks like this:

Inside, I saw people that looked like they were suffering from Cancer of the Kitten. Everyone looked sallow under the bright fluorescents. Drab gray curtains hung in the dirty windows. The room, an endless sea of cubicles and cardboard walls, was tastefully decorated with depression-affirming signs such as "Keep Trying!" and a carpet that looked a little like this:

I walked up to a woman with expressionless eyes.

"I didn't know I actually had to come in here," I said. "I spoke to people. They only said I had to register online. I registered online. But now I'm here."

The woman stared at me blankly.

"You need to take The Test," she said.

Incorrectly, I assumed that The Test, a "math and grammar" test, would involve math and grammar.

"Oh!" I thought. "As a teacher of English grammar, surely I will be the high achiever of this test! I will win the one hundred percent prize! I will be Oregon's Queen of Employment Tests!"

I was stationed in front of a computer with an ancient, barely alive monitor that flashed precariously, minutes from death.

"There are seven levels to this test," the woman explained. "If you get through all seven levels, there will be other things for you to do!"

"Do I get to begin in Limbo?" I wanted to ask. And then I clicked on the grammar section of the test.

My fears were realized on a computer screen. I don't think I'm the greatest intellectual in the whole world, but these were questions that I don't think anyone should have to legally stomach. The first question showed an image of a memo. The memo looked like this:

The question asked: to whom is the memo addressed?

I'm not joking.

Knocked off my peg, I nervously clicked "next" on the screen. The following question was:

The third question asked me to define the word "disinfect." At this point I had been at the unemployment office over an hour, which is enough time to start hearing the voices of deceased unemployed people, and I had already become a broken, hollow shell of the human condition. I could not bring myself to select the right answer. I clicked "cheerful, or happy."

And then I, for the first time all day, free from the shackles of standardized tests, I felt like this:

I failed every subsequent question with vigor. In the math section, I was asked to present .75 as a fraction, and happily, I clicked on "1/3." I said that "Smith Pharmaceuticals" was likely a boating company. And I felt more and more and more happy, until I failed out at level three out of seven (Gluttony!). My identical failures of the math and grammar section answers printed in a pretty pattern on the piece of paper. My caseworker, a calm-looking man in his sixties, noticed my artistic failure right away.

And what he told me was that the test was not actually important. Apparently, if you pass the seven levels of the not important test, you get a test that *is* actually important, and based on that tests, The State determines who you are. Fail at level five? YOU WILL NEVER BE A LAWYER.

"That's a pile of nonsense," I said.

"I thought you would think so," he said. "It's very systematic...and you appear to be a little bit of a rebel."

Now I am receiving unemployment. I have tamed bureaucracy.

-V