Thank you for calling the Unemployment Department of our Supreme Overlords, I am Styx. I’m here to determine your eligibility for unemployment claims and a Charon’s coin for trip to the afterlife.

Let’s review your history. You contributed every paycheck for 40 years to a fund you’ve never seen the returns on, growing huge wealth in Washington, DC for things like, um, we’re not sure. It just goes into a void called the “federal budget.”

We are here to judge your every move at your last job that unexpectedly turned off your VPN access and Zoom account on a regular super boring Monday morning because your numbers didn’t swell the coffers of BroCorp. And well, we need to know… just how bad that was. Because for some reason (a law in 1970 by Nixon I’m sure) it determines if you get to pay rent and buy food during this period of time you had NO IDEA was coming. Let me emphasize just how random this was. More random than a Gen-AI photo of your headshot under the Golden Gate Bridge.

How bad was your firing? On a Richter scale are we talking “shaking the bed,” or “causing chasms in the earth”? Because in California, we take our employment law not seriously at all. The corporate greed behemoth must be paid, and workers- have you read Steinbeck? – he made a career on how badly California treats all workers. In fact, there’s a line of 10 of them from India and/or Mexico ready to take your job unless your first and last name are 8 letters, divided evenly by 2, and beginning with E and end with K.