Unemployed: Day 11 (Strides, Sidetracks, and...

Today was a day that could have gone worse, but I'm not fond of how it did go.

We had a lot of things to take care of today - Laura called the court (who says we need to come in on June 18th, 6:30 PM, to deal with that nonsense); I faxed my prescription to the worker's comp insurance guy (at a cost of three bucks); and of course the big step, the 're-employment services orientation'.

Basically, the point of the orientation was to illustrate the services that the One-Stop Career Center provides - computers to help with job searching, fax machines, telephones, and so forth, info on how to use their website, explaining about maintaining your claim, etc. I also managed to find out that if the person who actually works for the Unemployment Office had been there that day, I could've turned in my proof of dependents / request for direct deposit there and taken care of it. Of course, she's off on vacation this week, and apparently the Unemployment Office doesn't send someone to replace her when she's out. I also managed to book an appointment to talk to a Department of Vocational Rehabilitation counselor to help with job training / job searching (they say they'll call within a week, or if they don't, to call them to remind them.) And barring finding work by July 30th, I'm expected to come in for a Service Review Workshop at 9:00 AM on said date. So, yeah. I'm guessing my next big step involves the Vocational Rehab people (and talking to the claims examiner on the 18th to determine whether I'm eligible for unemployment benefits or not. Fun times.)

So, that got reasonably taken care of, leaving four and a half hours to do the other big thing we wanted to do - attending the premiere of "A Mighty Heart", to review it for Gather. It was in New York City, and although we were skittish about driving there, one of our relatives agreed to meet us at a diner and do the driving for us, and another of our relatives was accompanying us as our second guest.

Time passed, we ate lunch, and at 3:45 we paid our bill - well, no, I paid our bill, because the general agreement was that I'd handle the food and gas, and the relative would get us to our destination. So I paid for the four of us to eat, and off we went to New York.

And, of course, problems started. First of all, it has been raining for most of the day; second of all, although we have a GPS that provides turn-by-turn directions (including recalculating if you miss a turn), the relative decided that he'd rather follow the directions he printed out at home on Mapquest and ignore the GPS and our wishes. Why take the Garden State Parkway when you could just take the Lincoln Tunnel off of the New Jersey Turnpike? That's stupid, he said.

Well, let's put it this way. As we left the Turnpike and approached New York City proper, it was turning 6 PM, because traffic picked up severely in the area that he'd insisted on going through instead of the Parkway. And, of course, we then spent the next thirty minutes at the Lincoln Tunnel, due to severe traffic. At about this time, the relative who'd been driving started getting bitchy and saying 'you might as well forget it', in between rambles about how finding parking would be impossible and that he'd probably just drive around with the car for three hours or something. Seeing as how we'd already spent over two and a half hours on the road to get there, we weren't so keen on that, so we insisted on using the GPS to get us the rest of the way there (this after he'd given up on following his own directions). At the time, we were seven miles away from our destination.

Another half hour of weaving through traffic got us five miles further ... but not further enough. 7:00, the movie had started, and our opportunity to see and review the movie had gone up in smoke. Our relative and driver refused to even try to get the rest of the way there, and insisted we go home... and then stopped at a McDonald's in the middle of the pouring rain because he (and the other relative) wanted to take a piss and eat a cheeseburger.

Then, back we drove for another two hours to the same diner, where everyone had to have another meal (the driver covered his, but I still had to cover mine, L's, and our other relative's meal). By the time we'd done that, and gotten home, it was 10:45 PM.

In short, I spent about one hundred dollars today (on meals and tolls), we used about half a tank of gas, we didn't manage to review the movie we'd spent all that time trying to get to (which means that's money we probably aren't going to get back), and we effectively wasted eight and a half hours in total dealing with this (2:00 PM being when I got out of the career center, and factoring in the time it would've taken to get home from there otherwise).

We are never, ever, ever going to even try to go to New York to do any reviewing again, unless some divine miracle occurs. And if I can help it, we're never going to ask that relative to drive us anywhere.