Nothing Hurts More than Paperwork

My severance package included a couple of checks, a severance agreement, a cover letter, and a printout of the state unemployment registration help web pages. That's right -- a printout of a web page. That was almost as helpful as asking for an outline of a presentation and getting a printout of PowerPoint slides, two per page.

I decided to apply for unemployment just then, and flipped through several pages of useless instructions.

The unemployment site wanted lots of details about my work history. Do you know how far out of date my resume is? Life gets more complicated because I occasionally do consulting work on the side. Instead of handling a 1099 myself and doing all of the withholding there, I do that work through a small cooperative which takes a fraction of the money to cover its expenses and then runs payroll as if I were an employee.

If you want to argue my work status very, very technically, I'm an employee of that company, even if they haven't paid me in a year because I haven't done any work for them in a year. How do you fill that out?

I did the best I could, flipping through web forms with magic appearing and disappearing flashy buttons, before learning that the result is someone at the employment office will send me postal mail with my information to confirm and send back -- or something.

It's almost worth it for $500/week, pre-tax. I decided that the incessant and useless paperwork of filing for unemployment, switching health insurance, managing my 401(k), et cetera is just about the final insult here. I may have been wrong in thinking that though....