Florida’s unemployment situation is an absolute shit show!
I work at the hotel for a very large company in an affluent part of the Florida panhandle. The week after St. Patrick’s Day I got a call on my day off saying, “We are being told to shut down by the Government, so we are shutting down and we don’t know when we are reopening.”
Two days we were told, if we were full time, that we would get paid $10 hr for 30 days, which was a god send. On the 10th of April, I got an email saying “We’re furloughing everybody, if we don’t reopen before the 30th of June you’ll be terminated.”
So I immediately logged in to try to file for unemployment. Florida’s unemployment situation is an absolute shit show! I hear nothing. Weeks and weeks and weeks without hearing anything. I try to find out what’s going on, but I can’t get a hold of anyone on the phone.
On May 20th, I only had a couple hundred dollars to my name when I got a call from my boss, saying we’re going to open up right before Labor Day weekend. So I get to go back to work.
The day I get home from my first night back at work, I get a package in the mail with a debit card from the DEO (Department of Economic Opportunity) with two weeks worth of benefits on it.