A rant, and a request:

 

My wife was laid off temporarily by her company over the holidays. Her employer is large enough to have a local HR department that has become pretty well useless for the last several years. Just barely, by the skin of her teeth, she managed to camp out on phone lines for long enough to talk to a real human in order to start her claim in late December. Now she has returned to work and she needs to close the claim out.

 

We found the ODJFS online web application to be cryptic and not really offering an explicit way to "stop" an unemployment claim.  We *thought* we found the magic check box in one form to do this, and it failed to submit without an error. She gets a queue of messages on the site from ODJFS in a "mailbox" and none of them indicate how to do this nor do they indicate that she successfully closed her claim.

 

She can't get anyone on the phone - their phone system just crashed - and the web site is an absolute dead end.

 

WTF? It doesn't take much to Google the news and see that the Ohio unemployment system is overwhelmed this season.

 

But what do *individuals* do to make certain that their claim is handled correctly?

 

I am not much help to her - I have no clue what she is supposed to do at this point. The last time I filed for unemployment was in '93 and I got a little blue book to keep track of employment applications. I went to a local state unemployment office in a shopping center and waited around for awhile in order to be served. I had to drive someplace when stuff like this came up but at least there was "a" way. Today, apparently, all unemployment claims funnel through the clogged and broken 1-800 numbers and the (totally crappy) web site.

 

Any war stories or tales of jumping ahead in line anyone wants to share? Any advice you can give? (TIA.)

 

This is freakin' stupid.  :whip:

I was on unemployement for about 4 months at the beginning of '07 and the website sucked then too. I never had any luck with the 1-800 number and always ended up talking to the wrong person, so I ended up using that crappy website. I'd gladly offer assistance if I remembered how the site worked, but fortunately its been a while. I think what I ended up having to do when I started working was file a new weekly claim as if I was still unemployeed but answered questions to the effect of that I was working, if that makes any sense. Good luck to you and your wife.

I think what I ended up having to do when I started working was file a new weekly claim as if I was still unemployeed but answered questions to the effect of that I was working, if that makes any sense. Good luck to you and your wife.

 

Yes, that seems like what we tried to do. We have no idea if the freaking thing "took" or not. And there is absolutely no help text nor instructions anywhere on this. Thanks for the thoughts.

I've found the website to be user-friendly, so far, in the two months I've had to use it. On the other hand, I've been filing my weekly reports but have not received a check in over a month. After two days of calling (at the time the site crashed), I finally got hold of a human being who graciously took my information, said she "red-flagged" it and sent it to a supervisor. That was Wednesday or Thursday, and I haven't heard a word since then (it's now Monday).