Thursday, February 12, 2009

EI frustrations partially explained

Well, about an hour ago, I finally got through to a Service Canada calling queue, and only waited a couple of minutes before speaking with an agent. (Recall that before today, their 1-800 number's outgoing message had been telling me they were too busy to handle my call, and I should try later.)

I found the maze of back & forth using their touch-tone response system was not very productive for my purposes. "All questions must be answered and no response may be entered until the full question is asked. Press 9 for 'no' and 1 for 'yes'. Press * to hear the question again..."

But the woman I finally spoke to was fantastic, helpful and on-the-ball.

She knew about the feature that restricts applicants from going back in and changing the End Date of their employment (or anything else for that matter), and was the first to mention the following bit of information, which I found to be pretty crucial to the whole process:

I have to personally visit my local Service Canada Centre, Record of Employment in hand, during business hours in order to get the ball rolling. And here I had assumed (because there is nothing on their website saying as such, nor in the letter they mailed to me) that I could enter the information online, thus saving a federal employee from carrying out this task manually.

Well, it's too late for me to get there today, but at least I know tomorrow what and how to do, and where to do it.

On the job hunt front, I put my new Resume onto profiles I created on Quantum, Workopolis and Monster, and now it's time to browse their job postings.

To date: Since being laid off, I have six new accounts with usernames and passwords to keep track of, and some that include "challenging questions" (I expect a huge increase in spam). It is indeed an ITIL-defined world after all. Surely someone out there needs a guy who can concoct or update documentation for all these labyrinthine virtual worlds.

- 30 -

3 comments:

Rural said...

Well DAMN! thats why after waiting thru the 8 weeks of seperation pay, plus annother 8 weeks of filing regular reports and getting the "we are working on it" message on the Ei line, being unable, like yourself to get thrugh to a "real" person we have seen no deposit in our account.
WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP. As you say there is NO mention ANYWHERE of having to attend the local office, in fact dialing the local office just sends you to all the 800 help lines that get you no where.
Glad I dropped back in and read your post. This needs to be realy put out there, I wonder how many others have been waiting for sorely needed funds and are in the same boat. Thanks Scott I will be blogging more on this on my own blog as soon as we get more info from the local office Monday.

Rural said...

OK, simply too pissed off to leave this alone, have added to you tale at http://ruralcanadian.blogspot.com/2009/02/eicf-unemployment-insurance-cluster-f.html

Jay said...

I applied online. I dropped off my ROE's a week later and voila I had EI after 6 weeks. Is the problem that you didn't realize you had to hand deliver ROE's? I remember from the website somewhere that I had to drop them off unless your employer submitted them electronically.

I think the purpose of filing online is just to get the paperwork done so the staff at HRDC can do even less than they do now.